At this time on Saturday we thought we’d be exploring out new surroundings in Paris, but alas, we were stymied by the “bomb cyclone.”  As it stands, I’m writing this in our den.  While yesterday’s weather was indeed pretty shitty as we drove to the Philadelphia airport, we knew the inbound plane from Rome was on the ground and we’d received updates of a gate change. I left Pat & Pat at the airport (a comedy act of their own) to check in bags, but as I was about to drop off the car, my Pat calls to say all flights had been canceled. In fact, our understanding was that some inbound flights were being rerouted to Buffalo. Yep, the weather was better in Buffalo.

I suppose we really shouldn’t be terribly surprised, the wind is still howling as I write this, but we did have some good luck and some bad. The bad is that the cancellation order came down about two minutes after Pat had checked her bag. So part of today will be spent trying to locate said bag, which as of last night was lost somewhere in the bowels of the PHL baggage handling system. I suspect it is still relatively chaotic at the airport, so this could be fun. There was basically zero chance of our bag turning up last night, at least not in a reasonable time frame, so we opted to hope for better luck today.

On the good luck front, while it sucks to have our departure delayed, it was fortunate that Pat was at the front of the line when the cancellation occurred. (Though it was unfortunate for the rest of the passengers who had to wait for the Pat & Pat show to run its course with the gate agent.) The agent was able to immediately rebook us into the same class of seats we had purchased (we were going to try American’s premium economy for this flight), but unfortunately not until Monday.  Pat’s niece Casey is probably more disappointed by the cancellation than we are because she is in Paris as an exchange student and had built her weekend around our arrival.

Now we have to try to rearrange a planned side trip to Normandy, which will have to be shortened.  D-Day beaches are still in, but the abbey at Mont St. Michel is probably out. We were able to tack on a couple days at the end to make up for our delayed departure, for which Pat and I are both grateful for having understanding bosses. It does mean more days out of work rather than have the trip go over a couple of weekends, but overall this comes under the category of “problems of the relatively affluent;” we didn’t lose power and we weren’t stranded at a train station for hours as happened to a number of Philadelphia commuters yesterday. This quickly will be forgotten.

Finally, to add to the serendipitous day, we figured on the way home that we would stop at one of our local joints; people in our area will recognize it in the photo above. Lights were on, doors were open, there were customers at the bar, but food? Ah no. Due to a power outage earlier, the kitchen staff took that as an opportunity to abandon their posts. Oh well, we’d have a drink anyway. I ordered my usual Hendricks martini. Ah, no again. Out of Hendricks. But Dorothy Parker was a fine substitute.