It was 3:00 a.m. one Sunday when my husband heard his blackberry buzz with an incoming email informing us that that our plane scheduled to leave San Antonio that morning had been cancelled. When he called the airline directly, he found out that if we rushed to the Austin airport and got new tickets issued by 4:30 a.m., we could catch the only flight scheduled out of the area back to Seattle that day at 5:00 a.m. We had to catch this last plane out of Austin! We stumbled to get dressed, threw our bags in the rental car and we were on the road by 3:30 a.m. We had exactly one hour to get to the Austin International Airport.

Before long and still dark outside, we did pass a small 8x8 sign depicting an outline of an airplane. This was the sign announcing the "Austin International Airport"? We missed the exit. With increased frustration, we got off at the next exit and backtracked. Arriving at the airport it was now 4:20 a.m. Thank goodness we made it to the ticket counter by 4:28 a.m. - our tickets were issued in time to make the flight. By the time we sat down in the plane, it was only 4:45 a.m. No one around us knew what we went through that morning, but it felt like we just went through a war.

-- Wendy M., Redmond