The best laid plans...

or should I say worst late planes?

So, I'm not in London. If everything had gone according to schedule, I should be crawling into bed in my new flat after forcing myself to stay awake all day. Instead, I've been chillaxing at the airport in Atlanta for the past fourteen hours.

Apparently Atlanta almost became the new Atlantis last night and hundreds of flights were delayed or cancelled. After a four-hour wait in Cincinnati, I got into Atlanta at about 1:30 a.m. The ever-so-helpful customer service rep said that all the hotels were booked and the next flight out was at 10:25 p.m., a full twenty-four hours after my scheduled departure. "If only you had gotten here sooner," he continued, "you would have had a comfortable bed to sleep in."

So I found my way to a semi-quiet terminal, dragged two benches together, and snatched a few minutes here and there between bouts of shivering. Luckily I had my pillow, a jacket, an eye mask, and my "Serenity Now" mix on my iPod. I really wish I wasn't traveling alone so someone could have laughed at how ridiculous I looked. Around 4 o'clock, they started buffing the floors and even Josh Groban's pipes couldn't compete with the noise, so I woke up and wandered a bit. I found one shop open and bought a ridiculously overpriced fleece blanket, but was able to catch three more nearly uninterrupted hours of sleep so I'll count that as a draw.

Around 8 o'clock I got up and washed my face as well as I could in the cold bathroom water then wandered into a duty-free shop. The angel workers there cleaned me up with some Clinique samples then gave me a MAC makeover. I may not have felt like a million bucks afterwards, but I no longer looked like a twenty-dollar hooker (:

Thanks to some finagling by my dad, I was bumped up to a 5 o'clock flight and have spent the last eight hours in the Delta Crown room. The chairs are a lot more comfy, so I've gotten in a bit more sleep. And there's free Wi-Fi. Plus they keep plying me with water and limes (no carbonation for me when travelling). There's also these adorable little trifles in the cutest little individual cups that make me want to steal some -- just like I was tempted my the plastic sacrament cups when I was little. (Anyone else, or was that just me?)

Okay, I can by that last sentence that I'm getting delirious. Just like my plans, when I'm tired, I often go askew...