Our friend Chiti that we met along the way
We got something to eat at Shoeless Joe's
Day 1: Thursday, April 5, 2007
The Delay
The most important bag we packed got left behind on the way to the airport. This bag had our passports and our cash so we had to go back and get it. Thank you Patti for meeting us halfway and thank you Jo Ann for doubling back around for us. It may have been a little bit of an omen. When we got to the Austin airport, we found out that high winds in Chicago were delaying many of the flights. We finally boarded ours 2½ hours after our originally scheduled time. We flew from Austin to Chicago and then rushed out of the plane to try and catch our connecting flight only to find out that it had left us.
Since some of the delays were due to mechanical failure instead of just the weather, American Airlines put us up in the Wyndam hotel for the night. We checked into the hotel, then walked to a nearby sports bar called Shoeless Joe's. Courtney ate a small pizza and Nick ate something called a Ba-Da-Bing: a hoagie piled high with seasoned beef and sausage. We washed it down with a few beers and finished up at about 1:00 a.m. We were tired and ready to go to bed so we took a brisk walk back to the hotel (by brisk I mean short and cold - it was near freezing in Chicago).