9/11

[OTB]

My wife and I were just taking off in an American Airlines flight from Minneapolis to Baltimore (we had spent the weekend on a lake in northern Minnesota with my mom and brother and his family) when the first plane hit, about the time we were over central Wisconsin the second plane hit (we didn't know it at the time), but the captain came on the intercom and said that there was a national emergency and that they were being directed to land "immediately" at O'hare, and that as more info came in that he would relay it to us.

Immediately and O'hare don't follow in the best of times; we circled for several hours till we got landed, and then sat on the tarmac next to the control tower (which we could see was being evacuated by lots of cops) for another hour and a half till they could find an open gate. Meanwhile, passengers are calling family and cell phones are going off everywhere...rumors are flying around and there is a growing sense of panic in the plane as cells are on overload and everyone is getting busy signals....

I spent 15 years in the airline industry and went through O'hare MANY times. When we finally got to a gate and off-loaded, it was eeiirie.... everything was closed (about 11 am in the morning) and, as we were one of the last flights in, the place was EMPTY... till we got to the airline counters/transportation counters....pandemonium,thirty people deep.

I knew that it was going to be days, if not weeks, before we'd be flying home ( a shutdown of one or two large airports for weather issues could snarl up airline traffic for DAYS....this was gonna be a major goatfuck) and that all the hotel rooms for 50 miles were going to be full. I knew that we HAD to get out of Chicago NOW if we weren't going to get stuck sleeping in a school lunchroom somewhere.

We only had carry-ons so luggage was no issue, but getting out of Chicago was going to be. The rental car companies were NOT letting any cars out-of-state (in fact many were pulling down the steel shutters over their counters). I sent my wife over to another set of transport counters and I told here I'd meet her down in the Hilton's Business Center (they had free internet down there). I got online, reserved a car at Midway Airport, called Midway to make sure they still had cars and were letting them go out, grabbed my wife who had a new friend in tow and we grabbed a cab for Midway.

In the cab my wife introduced us to our new friend, a professor of engineering from U of WV who was flying back from the WC to Morgantown. She had a cell phone and was willing to share expenses to get home. About half way to Midway, the radio in the cab came on and the dispatcher told the cabbie that Midway was closed to traffic and that we couldn't go there.

We stopped at two car rental agencies on the street and they weren't letting ANY cars out. As we pondered our choices, we passed a U-haul shop...I yelled at the cabbie to pull in; I ran up to the counter and asked if they had any trucks and they had one 10 footer... so I threw them my credit card and grabbed my wife and our new friend from the cab.

We tossed our three pieces of luggage in the back of the truck and we took off. traffic was so snarled it took us three hours to get out of Chicago, but then it was like something out of "The Day the Earth Stood Still". We were on US 80 and there was NO traffic......I drove pretty much non-stop for 800 miles and I don't think we saw 100 cars going either way... and not one trooper.

After dropping out friend off in Morgantown we got home early Wednesday AM.. and when we turned the TV on was when we saw the mayhem for the first time.... and were appalled.