Part One
I topped off a long and virtually-but-not-quite-stress-free summer with a trip to Vegas and California. Around May, the month of my birthday, I found out that Tears for Fears would be performing at a handful of gigs between late June and late July. So for my birthday, I talked my parents and Michael into getting me tickets to the Vegas show. Before that, Alex, my 15-year-old, wanted to take a trip back to California to visit with the friends she left behind; except she wanted to go in June, and since I wouldn’t let her travel that far alone - being the paranoid parent that I am - I told her the only way she could go was if she went at the end of July with me because I refused to make two trips back to the High Desert. I left the desert for a reason. While in California, we were also supposed to go to San Diego and visit with some friends there.

One of my best friends, Mary, was supposed to attend the concert with me, but for personal reasons, was unable to make it. Since I’d previously taken my two oldest daughters to see TFF, I thought, since Mary couldn’t make it, that it might be fun to take Alex to her first concert. Fantastic! We planned our trip, flying into Vegas the night before the show, staying a couple of nights with another one of my long-time best friends, Tina, then heading to the High Desert in sunny Southern California. But to get there, we had to fly, and to fly cheap, we had flew standby.

It’s great that we can fly for free through Michael’s benefit package at Pinnacle Airline. Yay, right? Not so much. The downside is that we have to fly standby and we have to fly via Pinnacle or Northwest. So there’s this nifty little airfare called ZED Fare or Flat fare that allows us to fly standby using any carrier – for a nominal fee. So, if you’re current on your airline news, you know that Northwest Airline is having issues. One of the bigger one's being a lack of crew members to fly the planes. This has resulted in numerous cancelled flights. On top of that, current crew members have “phoned in sick” (yeah, right), resulting in even more cancelled flights. Paying passengers on those cancelled flights are rerouted to other carriers and generally take priority over regular standby passengers like myself. This is where my adventures began -- and ended.

I usually get a little nervous before flying, but I’ve never had the experience I had on 26 July. I’m convinced it was an anxiety attack of some form. Before we left, a couple of things were brought to our attention. First, there was the guy in Seattle who missed his flight to Memphis and made a bomb threat. Yep! He was flying Northwest. I didn't worry too much about that; he was angry and said something stupid in front of TSA and now he'll probably go to jail. However, what did have a direct effect on us was the lack of pilots Northwest currently has to fly the planes. I didn't think we'd get a flight out, let alone together. I worried myself into an anxiety attack the likes of which I've never had before and ran to the bathroom across from our terminal where the contents of what I’d recently eaten came back to haunt me.

I'm convinced it was Michael's presence (he can get past security with his badges) in his Pinnacle work shirt that got our seats...together in fact...and we made it to Vegas, got our rental car, and headed to Tina's. We got lost a block away from her apartment, and she had to come rescue us. While I didn't get much sleep that night, my nerves had time to settle before the next evening's concert festivities...