The Great Cleveland Disaster of '09

"If you can't say nothin' nice, don't say nothin' at all."
--Thumper

It is poor manners to speak for people you don't know, to talk behind others' backs, and also to bad mouth Cleveland--for she is spiteful.

Chris and I woke the morning of the 1st with bright hopes and a belief that our grand adventure had begun. Shane drove us to the Atlanta airport, we boarded our tiny flight to Cleveland, and all seemed to be well with the world. So excited were we, that we joked constantly about our disdain for Ohio. We patted ourselves heartily on our backs all the while congratulating the fact that at least we would only be spending an hour and a half in the Cleveland airport.

We were wrong. Dead wrong. As we sat waiting for our 2 o'clock flight to JFK in New York to depart, we listened to announcements about how that very day was the 85th anniversary of CLE (Cleveland Airport.) We were told that CLE was the first city owned commercial airport in the world. Chris and I smirked at the news, all the while eyeing the incredible ammount of Arabs that populated the airport. Cleveland's bathroom signs were even catered to the immigrant population with "bathroom" written in English, Spanish, and Arabic. Soon, our smirks faded as we realized that it was 2 o'clock, and our plan hadn't boarded.

Then the announcment came. All flights into JFK had been delayed because of weather, and our wheels up time from CLE was such that there was no way we would make our 7:30 connector to Dublin. Apart from us, two couples were in the same predicament. The gate agent, Scott Z. (who would later prove our hero) presented us with our option: stay the night in Cleveland, catch the 5pm flight back to Atlanta the next day and then fly out to Dublin that next night. Needless to say, the very prospect of spending even another hour in Cleveland was devastation, and frankly unexceptable. I quickly put in calls to my support team (Mom and Dad) and got them praying to Jesus that he would deliver out of Cleveland. By now it was 4 o'clock and Dublin seemed a far off pipe dream. Then Chris overhead someone mention Shannon, which is the other major airport in Ireland. The lightbulb went off and we quickly scurried over to Scott and asked him quite simply to put us in Ireland by any means necessariy. He did just that, and put us on the 10 out of JFK to Shannon that night. He then was even so kind as to personally retag our luggage for Shannon instead of Dublin. Finally the pilot called us to board the plane. However, aftere a few minutes, they made us leave the plane in what I have dubbed the Cleveland Two Step. Thus we sat at the gate until 7:30 when we finally got out to JFK, landing around 9:15.

Unfortuanley for us, our troubles were not over. If CLE was our purgatory, then we were sprung loose only to land in hell....