Easter Weekend

Last week Cely and I were finally able to fly again so we went back to the Quad Cities for Easter.

While we were there we went to Iowa City to see a show that Alexis and her friend Danielle had in a room over a bar across the street from Prairie Lights. Alexis had two sets of photographs up, highway pictures and ossuary. When we were getting ready to take the red-eye out of Portland to go home Alexis called us and told us that a tornado had hit Iowa City. When we were up there with her we saw some of the damage. It was really shocking. She had been downtown on her bike just a little while before the tornado hit. It destroyed one of the Catholic churches downtown. Father Rudy Juarez who used to be in Davenport is the priest there.









This picture shows an apartment building with broken windows and the entire cinderblock facade blown off.



The weather seemed ok when we were there but it wreaked havoc on our trip back. We were planning to leave for home on Monday but since we fly standby, I was getting nervous about making it back since most of the flights looked full or overbooked. We decided we could get out easier if we left Sunday afternoon. It was a good idea in theory but didn't work in practice. We got on the plane in Moline an hour late around 5pm. They taxied out to the runway to await clearance from Chicago to fly in. After about 15 minutes the pilot came on the intercom and said that the flight was cancelled but that they could put us on a chartered bus to O'Hare. By the time we got to O'Hare the last plane to Portland had already left. As we were standing in a long line at the customer service stand we decided that we better do whatever we could to get out of Chicago that night because our chances of getting a standby seat on Monday morning would be minimal. We had only two choices San Francisco or Las Vegas. The Las Vegas plane had the most open seats so we jumped at that one and finally got out of O'Hare at 11:30pm. We arrived in Las Vegas at about 1:30 and had to wait until 6am to begin our next leg towards Portland. The Las Vegas airport is pretty weird, full of ads for shows and slot machines. I thought it might be fates that brought us there so we headed for the slots. But it was not to be. After plugging a few bucks into the machines it became clear that we weren't going to be instant millionaires off the quarter machines. So in the morning, since there were no direct flights to Portland, we caught a flight to Denver. After a couple of hours laying over in Denver we made it on the first flight out. We finally made it home at around 4pm, about 26 hours after we began our return trip. I hope our next trip works out better.