For what it's worth, Harlan was telling the truth. Our bags did eventually show up the next day, and the delivery guy had our phone number, so finding us wasn't too big a problem. When Jen opened the bags, she discovered little slips from the TSA, informing us that our bags had been randomly selected to be physically searched. Unfortunately for the TSA, one of the bags had been randomly selected to be our dirty laundry bag. So, the way I see it, we're just about even.

As Jen mentioned in her last post, we have over 100 pictures from our trip on our digital camera that I'll probably try to download sometime today.

Jen also mentioned lots of stories to tell, so I'll tell one now and get it out of the way. We were both pretty excited/anxious/nervous about getting back to Michigan, because Jen had never flown commercially before, and the last time I did it was 7 years ago. Our flight was scheduled to depart Tucson at 1:15, so we had decided we would get on the road for Tucson at 9:00. Well, our alarm went off at 7:00 that morning, and by 7:45 we were both ready to leave. We decided rather than sit and sweat and stare at each other until 9, we would just leave earlier. The drive was fine, no complications and no incidents worth mentioning. We stopped at the McDonald's near the airport to use the bathroom (and gather our wits before we actually arrived at the airport), and decided to eat a quick, light breakfast. We had been counting on a 2 hour 40 minute layover at O'Hare, so we'd have plenty of time to eat a real meal. As we were sitting in McDonald's, I got a call on my cell phone from the the American Airlines automated flight status update system (we'll call it Fred), letting us know our flight had been delayed by 20 minutes or something like that. So we left McD's and dumped our car at the airport Park 'N Save. After trying heroically to figure out the "self check-in" computer at American Airlines, we made our way to the security station outside our terminal. That went pretty well, until I forgot to take my cell phone off my belt before going through the metal detector. As I reached down to take the phone off my belt, it started ringing, and the number on my display was Fred's. Not wanting to upset the security guys by answering my cell phone in the middle of a security check, I silenced it and hoped Fred would leave a voice mail. I gave X-ray guy my cell phone, and he politely told me, "Go ahead. You get one more try." Holy freak-out! Thankfully, I made it through the second time, and it only took us a moment to find our gate. I checked my voice mail to see if Fred had left a message. He had, and our flight had been delayed again. All told, that flight wound up getting delayed about 6 times, and Fred helpfully called me every single time. It got to the point where the American Airlines people just read us a list of connecting flights in Chicago that we wouldn't be making. There were 6 or 7 flights on that list, and I confess it made me a little tense. Ours wasn't on it, but we'd be cutting it very close. Suddenly, eating at O'Hare wasn't looking likely, if we could even make our connecting flight at all.

We arrived at O'Hare about 20 minutes before our connecting flight was scheduled to depart. We'd decided on the plane that we would find a screen, find our gate, and book it there without even trying to eat or use the bathrooms. We found a screen pretty quickly and discovered that our ride to Flint had been delayed an hour. Suddenly, we had time to use the bathroom and eat. This was very good for us, since our quick breakfast at McDonald's had been our last meal, about 10 hours prior. We found our gate first, so we'd know where to head when it was time, then we roamed for a while, looking for something worth eating. We wound up at McDonald's again, and it was maybe the best McDonald's food we'd ever eaten. For dessert we grabbed some mini cinnamon rolls from Cinnabon and took them back to our gate to wait. And then our flight was delayed again. And again. And we didn't get off the ground in Chicago until almost 10:00. Jen's parents, sister (Barb), and brother-in-law (Matt) picked us up at Flint Bishop to take us back to Deckerville for the night. First, though, we had to make a run to Saginaw to drop off Barb and Matt. That was one of the longest drives in the history of the world. That's how it felt to me, anyway. We didn't end up getting to bed in Deckerville until 3am.

I think I'll stop the story there for now. Maybe I'll stick some pics on here later.