“So, you want to come to the airport and shove your microphone into face after face after face of my passengers, eh? Just face after face for a full week,” the CEOs of airlines around the world muttered under their breath in unison before Christmas. “I guess the foot’s on the other hand, now.”

That’s a link to Airplane!, but this saga is more a modern-day retelling of Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

My flight to Ohio was scheduled to leave the afternoon of the 23rd. It was timed beautifully to land just after that winter storm. Naturally, I got a text from American a couple hours before departure explaining the flight was cancelled.

They could get me into Dayton the 26th. Like a modern day Neal Page, I started looking at alternatives.

Loyal Scaiaholics will recall I’d blog frequently while sitting on airplanes back in the network days. It’s possible I’ve lost status since I’m no longer excited to pay as much as necessary to fly to Orlando to cover a story right now, but the folks at American were still helpful even though I suspect many of them were borderline frazzled and not thrilled to be working long hours so close to Christmas.

I called in to see if I could get a flight to Cincinnati or Columbus. The agent didn’t have any open seats but instead of rushing me off the phone, she offered to expand the search to other airports “in concentric circles from your original destination.”

“I have an open seat from DFW to Fort Wayne, Indiana tonight. Would you like me to book you on that flight to Fort Wayne?” she asked.

“I can’t imagine anyone wants to fly to Fort Wayne,” I explained. “But I suspect people from Fort Wayne feel the same about Dayton. Let’s book it.”

I was planning to take the train to the airport, fulfilling the “trains” portion of the film albeit a bit early. The flight to Fort Wayne took off sooner, though, so I drove. Tragically, the retelling is just “Planes and also Automobiles,” which may not have the same ring to it.

When I got to the counter to check a bag, though, the agent said the flight to Fort Wayne had just been cancelled.

He offered to put me on a flight to Toledo or Detroit. Since my original flight was farther south, I asked about Indianapolis or if anything was available connecting to Cincinnati. He said I’d have to call customer service again for an airport that far away.

Again, the woman who answered the phone was patient in looking at every doggone airport between Texas and the North Pole. She found a flight to Louisville.

“Let’s do it!” I exclaimed.

She laughed.

“Hmm,” I replied. “Did I sound weirdly excited just now?”

“It’s all good. You just sounded like, ‘Somebody get me out of here!'” she explained.

I realized Louisville was my third airport of the night. This time, the flight wasn’t cancelled; it just took off three hours late because the plane was late arriving at DFW. The flight crew spent time milling around the gate, so this reporter suspects they were not having any more fun waiting out the delay than the rest of us.

Meantime, I kept busy by reciting Neal Page lines in a text with some associates.

That gave me time to reserve a rental car in Louisville. This reporter also suspects a three hour drive at 2 in the morning would have been borderline burdensome for whichever relative was dispatched to pick me up.

And the folks at the Louisville Airport were also very accommodating, given that we showed up about 2 am on Christmas Eve.

I got the keys to the rental car and wandered over to the baggage claim with about 500 of my closest friends.

A few minutes later, the rental car guy came and asked if I’d get the car so they could close the garage and go home.

“Where can I park it while I wait?” a reporter asks.

“Just leave it in front of the terminal with the hazards on,” he really did reply, expressing admirable restraint in the face of the “if you see something, say something” campaign. “Airport police know what’s going on.

“Plus,” he added. “It’s going to take forever to get your bags.”

You’ll notice “forever” is bold and in italics. He really hit the word when he said it, but that’s also known as foreshadowing.

When I got the car, I realized what he meant. A whole line of cars was in front of the terminal with their hazards on. I no longer felt pressure to say anything.

Back inside, we were all making friends with each other over the next 90 minutes.

An American Airlines employee came out and explained it’s 3 doggone a.m. [Note from American: She most certainly did not use the term, “doggone.”], so the airport only had one baggage crew available.

Our bags would come out in the order we landed. And that’s how us punks from DFW learned we weren’t even the last flight of the night. We’d come out first, followed by Charlotte, followed by O’Hare.

This wait for luggage gave me a chance to plan the drive to Dayton.

“At least at 3 in the morning, I won’t have to worry about traffic!” I thought to myself in a fit of pollyannaish tomfoolery.

This is when Del Griffith would have told me, “I’m saying you are stuck in Louisville.”

Kentucky State Police had closed Interstate 71 south of Cincinnati, in part because of several crashes and dozens of stalled cars but mainly, I suspect, to inconvenience me.

Loyal Scaiaholics will recall we discussed Planes, Trains and Automobiles previously when I noticed they somehow wound up in Wisconsin. To get around the closure, I had to drive well out of the way, too, going east to Lexington and then up I-75.

If there’s anything we can learn from this storm, it’s that people will do whatever it takes to reach Ohio for Christmas. And everyone who had the pleasure of dealing with frazzled airline customers along my trip was patient from American Airlines scheduling me on flights to three different cities to the rental car guy telling me it was totally cool to just leave my blinkers on to the two dudes I imagine on that baggage crew in Louisville who had probably signed up for the overnight shift thinking it’d be easy.

In Louisville, they made the announcement after we started thinking our bags had already been delivered and then set off to the side. We started sifting through those, and that’s how we found out we had fared better than Southwest. Some of those bags were tagged for New York and Philadelphia.

I made it home for Christmas, though, and did it with the help of a lot of people who worked late, worked in bad weather and helped me book, re-book and re-re-book last minute flights. My take-away is similar to Neal Page but slightly different: My pledge is to not get even a little bit wiser.