Italy Trip Day 1

Decided to do a post for each day of the trip here as well as link to Candi's blog (she did an amazing job matching up all her pictures to the descriptions). 

My trip began 1 week ago early on a Saturday morning as I met Candi and her sister, Jacqueline to go to the Portland airport. We got all checked in and had a fairly uneventful flight at first. Then right around the time we were supposed to land, the captain came on the radio. "I have some bad news," he says, "look out your windows. Obviously I cannot land in this." We look out our window to see (gasp!) rain clouds, and say to ourselves "really? What's the big deal here?" Obviously, when you come from Oregon you wonder why this would slow anything down. The captain goes on to explain that there is thunder and lightning, and our flight (and many others)  are being diverted to Milwaukee. 

This stressed us quite a bit since we were only going to have 1 1/2 hours in Chicago before the flight to Rome left. Sure enough, our 3 hour and 45 minute flight transformed into a 6 hour flight as we sat on the Tarmac in Wisconsin and eventually got refueled and back in the air to Chicago. Once landed, Candi and I did a mad dash through the large airport. Our flight to Italy had also been delayed twice and perhaps we could make it??

Nope. We arrived at the gate ten minutes after the flight took off. Then we spent the next hour trying to finagle our way onto any flight in Europe that could get us connection to Italy. That could've even been cool to get stuck in Munich or Frankfurt (2 we were looking at) even if it was overnight we'd get the bonus of another country. Instead? No flights had room. No flights left Chicago until six the next night. Because we were ten minutes late- we had just lost an entire day in Rome. Luckily, Candi has family in the Chicago area, who came and got us and let us stay until we could try again.

On a side note, there were no thunderstorms in Chicago that night, at least none that anyone we knew in area knew about. There was however an air traffic control tower down ( maybe due to weather???). Why we weren't told this, I'm not sure -but my guess is that it is because of the fact that United only offers hotel vouchers for delays/missed flights that are not weather related...