I had a great time in Utah, skiing with Kelsey last week. She and her sister were very hospitable, and skiing in Utah was a whole new experience for me. Very intense. However, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that I was a little trapped in Utah. When I flew in last Saturday the valley of Salt Lake City was completely overcast. I thought it was a plain with snow as first, but as we descended I realized it was a thick white cloud. The residents of the city had another name for it: smog. Choking the whole city. From the canyons where the ski resorts are the city was completely shrouded. It was ominous.
A few days later the smog cleared when the snow clouds rolled in. Over a few days we got about a foot. We had some problems on the busses getting to and from the canyons, but in the end I got to ski every day that I wanted to. On a few occasions there was so much powder on the slopes I felt like a human snowplow.
I was going to go from Utah to either LA, San Francisco, or Denver, but those plans fell through, so I stayed in Utah until Saturday.
Now that storm that dumped a foot on Utah and the rest of the Rockies – it went East. Southeast to be precise, right toward Atlanta and North Carolina, my connecting and final destinations. On Friday morning things were looking bad, so I called Delta and got myself on the red eye that night to Atlanta. I figured that if I could get to Atlanta I would have more options on Saturday to get to Raleigh-Durham.
Kelsey dropped me off at around 10:00 PM at the airport. The following is my account of the next 14 hours, or why I believe it is easier to escape from Alcatraz than Salt Lake City:
- 10:00 PM – Arrive at airport
- 1:00 AM – Board airplane
- 1:47 – Begin taxiing
- 2:05 or so – Complete de-icing of aircraft
- 2:06 – Passenger feels ill and decides he needs to get off of the plane
- 2:20 – We are back at the gate for the ill passenger to get off
- 2:21 – They need to get the passenger and his brother’s bag out from under the plane, but the few baggage handlers at the airport in the middle of the night are handling other flights
- 3:35 – The baggage handlers, after processing the other flights and taking every single bag off of my plane, find the brothers’ bags and reload the plane
- 3:45 – We take off on a three hour journey for Atlanta, ensuring that everyone on the plane will miss their connections (I was kind of asleep, and I don’t remember if we had to de-ice again)
- 8:45 (now Eastern time) – Land in Atlanta, where there was some freezing rain but things seemed fairly operational
- 9:00 or so – Seeing that my flight to NC had been delayed until 9:30, I become that guy running through the airport to make my flight
- 9:15 – I make it to the gate, where they have halted boarding (ie. further delayed the flight) because of snowy conditions in Raleigh-Durham
- 9:45 – I get on the plane, with boarding having re-commenced
- 10:00 – The flight gets further delayed, since some passengers began wandering around the airport during the delaying-the-delay confusion of the prior hour and the gate agents were trying to corral those passengers
- 10:15 – We can’t turn on the engines until Intake Inspectors make sure the freezing roan didn’t collect in the engine
- 10:30 – The engines being free of ice, we begin taxiing
- 10:45 – Taxiway is shut down for a Korean Airlines A-380 which is so big it can only use one taxiway, the same one my aircraft was trying to occupy
- 11:00 – We are waiting to de-ice, since there is a line at the de-icing pad
- 11:15 – We begin de-icing
- 11:16 – The de-icer runs out of de-icing liquid
- 11:30 – The de-icer finds more de-icing liquid and completes the de-icing shower
- 11:40 or so – We take off
- 12:30 PM – Touchdown in Raleigh-Durham, on a snowy runway, which didn’t make much sense to me because I thought the whole reason the flight was delayed was so that they could remove snow from the runway, but seeing that we had a safe landing I wasn’t bothered much since being delayed was the only thing that got me on that plane and into NC in the first place
- 12:45 – We get off the plane and I walk to baggage claim
- 1:00 – My skis get stuck on the conveyor belt and a baggage area worker has to walk up onto the conveyor belt and unstick them, the whole time me hoping that someone doesn’t come into the airport and start shooting or exploding a bomb, seeing how ironic that would be after finally actually making it to NC (these are the things I think about when I am in airports, malls, and clubs)
- 1:10 – Uber picks me up at passenger pick-up
- 2:10 – Due to snowy roads and snowplows slowing down traffic on the highway I finally make it to my house, the Uber having taken one hour, while it usually only takes 20 minutes. The driver refuses to drive the 100 yards down the parking lot to my house, since it is unplowed
- 2:13 – I get into my house, approximately 14 hours after leaving Kelsey’s in Salt Lake City
The whole time, every time a pilot or gate agent made an announcement I was expecting them to say that they were cancelling the flight. Luckily it didn’t happen.
Total snowfall in Raleigh-Durham: 4″