Adventures in Traveling

JoAnn and I sit at the Las Vegas airport encountering a most unusual experience: Flight delays due to snow. Yes, for the 2nd time in 3 days Las Vegas had a major snow storm. Major for Las Vegas. In fact, as we learned later, it was the biggest snow storm in recorded history - a whopping 3.5 inches. Wednesday afternoon the airport had to close because of snow. My thought was that the airport doesn’t have deicing equipment. They don’t have much in the term of deicing equipment as we are finding out this morning. More importantly, however, there are no snowplows at the Las Vegas airport. And even if there were, who would know how to drive them. The last time we had snow that closed the airport was 1979.

On the positive side, as we sit looking west towards our home, the Spring Mountains, Red Rock, and Mount Charleston are just beautiful. If we were home we would have driven out into Red Rock today - at least I would have - just to take photos. This is a special event that may not occur again for years.

Hopefully in a short while we will board our aircraft and wing our way to Iowa and that bone-chilling cold.

It wasn’t so short and it was like watching the keystone cops as the airport tried to get their deicing equipment to work. The deicer would fit in my garage - this isn’t Denver! It was a small container and it took 15 to 30 minutes for every aircraft. Then it broke and it was the ONLY one! At one point I counted 7 people around the deicer: 3 supervisors (what do they know?), 2 operators who kept pushing the same button, and 2 hangers-on. In the meantime the airline had a baggage conveyor truck (for getting the baggage into the aircraft) with a driver and a person on the conveyor and every time they get to an airplane the person on the conveyor would walk to the top, take his broom, and push snow off the aircraft between the engine and the aircraft body. I’ve got to tell you, my confidence level was not very high.

After some 60 minutes some guy drove up in a pickup, pulled out two tools, one being a wrench, walked over to the deicer, spent 2 minutes, and had the lift working. Of course it still didn’t go very high. As our aircraft pulled out and we went down the row of remaining aircraft at their gates, it didn’t look like any were going anywhere soon. There was snow on the wings, in the engines, and on the tails. The sun was out and slowly things were melting, but not very fast.

JoAnn noted the patrons were particularly relaxed. Many had spent the night at the airport. They were resigned to “someday” getting out of Las Vegas.

And we were finally off for a beautiful flight from Las Vegas to Des Moines. We are in the air looking down on a mixed white region and by all accounts flying into the storm that blew through Las Vegas on Monday. Well, it is Christmas, it is air travel, and yes, it is an adventure.


The payoff is spending time with our family and our new grandson - Joshua! It was a long day, but what a great ending.