Still more travel excitement

I made it home, finally. More delays. More odd people.

Got to Charlotte without incident. More storms were forecast for this afternoon in Charlotte, but my flight was leaving in the morning, so I wasn't too concerned.

I hurried through the Charlotte airport. I had 40 minutes before my flight was supposed to board and I wanted to do two things: buy a North Carolina snowglobe and buy a ginormous caramel apple at the chocolate store, and I would have to go out of my way to get the caramel apple. But when I got there, all they had to put the apples in were little bags. I wanted to buy one, throw it in my carry-on and have it when I got home. But they didn't have any kind of box. So, I hauled ass around the corner to get to my gate--which I passed because the sign was missing/nonexistent. But I did get my snowglobe.

Shortly after I sat down a rather mousey woman sat directly across from me. My first thought: "I bet she's a librarian." I could barely look at her because she was cross-eyed. And she had those glasses that made her eyes twice as big as they really are which made the cross-eyed-ness even more prominent. But I just couldn't look at her because I knew I would stare. So I would look up and there she was right in my sightline and then I'd look away. Quickly. Not like that wasn't obvious or anything.

THEN, the gate agent made this announcement: "The flight to Memphis will be delayed because we don't have a captain." No captain? At first it sounded like they had lost the captain. They said they thought he was in the D concourse (we were in C), so they were sending someone to check on it. Then it began to sound like they never had a captain. Then they found a captain---and they way it was stated it sounded as though they had to run around to find someone asking if there was an extra captain hanging out somewhere. What airline schedules a flight and then puts together a crew without a pilot? US Airways, that's who. So what did we do? We sat there for two hours why they tried to find a pilot. What the hell?

We finally boarded and who sat next to me? The cross-eyed woman. And she was a very sweet woman on her way to Ukraine for two weeks with her sister to do some sort of mission work. She wasn't a librarian--she was a retired kindergarten teacher.

So, I got to Memphis to hours later than scheduled, hauled my wheel-less garment bag to my car parked ten miles from the terminal and took off. And then on my way out of Memphis I saw some guy standing by the side of the road doing some slow-motion dance while waving around what looked like a white tube sock. Seriously.