Consequences

With this illness there are always consequences.  Of course this is true even when well.  If you eat too much sugar you get a sugar buzz.  If you drink too much you get a hangover.  If you have too much caffeine you can't sleep.  But with this illness everything has a consequence.  No matter what you do the result is the same you end up on the couch unable to move.  Monday and Tuesday I was recovering from Baffled's excellent weekend.  Today I'm recovering from picking my Mum up from the airport.  Thank goodness my hubby was driving.  I wouldn't have been able to handle this minor disaster if I had gone on my own.

First a little background information: I live near Boston so Logan airport is the closest airport to my house.  Logan is an international airport and huge.  It has five terminals each with two floors.  Departures are on the top floor and arrivals are on the bottom floor of each terminal.  And thanks to the TSA we can no longer dally around the pick up area.  It takes ten minutes to drive the loop back to the terminal where your passenger might be. 

Now the story.  Mum flew in to visit over Thanksgiving.  Yay!  I was so excited that I didn't sleep well the night before.  I kept waking up.  And of course when I finally fell into a deep sleep the neighbor's dog started barking and woke me up.  Anyway, the day finally arrived and hubby and I went to the airport.  We drove into the passenger pick up area of the arrivals level of terminal C.   No Mum.  There were too many cars to pull up curb side so we decided to drive the loop and try again.  Well since the whole Big Dig thing in Boston, Logan has been under construction as well.  It took a bit of navigation on my husband's part to get around the loop correctly.   Of course, in true Boston fashion, the signage sucks and are even totally missing in the major intersection.  Not an improvement by my definition but hey no one asked me either.  Anyway, loop two.  Still no Mum.  This time there was curb space so we pulled over and sat waiting.  Still no Mum.  Finally the TSA cop came over and waved us away.  Loop three:  I decided to get out of the car and walk around the inside of the terminal to find out what was going on.  Hubby drove off for round four and five.  Now of course she flew in on a small airline that shares space with JetBlue.  I walked up to the only monitors in the lobby only to find out they only list JetBlue flights even though Cape Air shares their facilities.  So no flight information.  I go to the information desk, "could you find out for me if the Cape Air flight from New York has arrived yet please?"   "Cape Air doesn't fly out of New York."  "Oh yes it does.  My Mum is on the flight."   "No they don't."  I guess stupidity isn't limited to doctor's offices.  "Lake Placid."  "Oh.  Let me look."  Now check a map folks; Lake Placid is defiantly in New York.  This information person isn't going to win Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? anytime soon even though she works in an international airport.  Anyway, when she finally figured out that Cape Air does indeed fly out of Lake Placid NY she told me that it had been delayed and that I needed to check upstairs to find out when it was going to land.  Ugh.  I'm already tired.  My legs feel like lead balloons.  Off to the escalator.  I get to the upstairs lobby and all I see is United and JetBlue agents.  Then tucked in a corner I see one little desk for Cape Air.  By this point, the desk looks like it is miles away.  I feel like I am traversing several football fields rather than a few feet to the desk.  Luckily it wasn't busy and there was no line.  In fact the girl behind the desk was reading a book.  That is a first at Logan.  Anyway, she tells me that the flight was not delayed and that it had in fact already landed.  Okay, back downstairs and to the batcar.  I am so very lucky that there are lots of seats out on the passenger platform.  I am now walking as slow as molasses.  I sit down and wait for husband to arrive.  He picks me up and since there is no curb space we drive off again.  We stop at the deli on this loop so he can get a sandwich.  We have now been circling the airport for 45 minutes.  We make loop 6.  Still no Mum or parking so off we go again.  Loop 7: I get out again.  I make another walk through of the lower lobby.  The same three people are sitting there as the last time.  No one is at the bank of phones.  There is no luggage on the carousels.  And still no Mum.  I go back out to the platform and sit down again.  I'm toast.  I keep looking around while waiting for hubby to come back on loop 8.  We have now called the house to leave a message with my kid in case grandma calls the house.  We've called my sister in NY who called the NY airport to see if she had gotten on the plane, which she had.  My sister was now in a panic and all I wanted to do was sleep.  Crap.  We finally decided that we had to park the car in the garage and go look inside, check the bathrooms and get security involved.  So hubby beaches the car in the garage.  Of course the only parking spots were the furthest possible from the terminal C.  Hubby insisted that I stay in the car and try to sleep while he went walking around the airport.  For some reason he didn't want to peel me off the floor since I was close to collapsing.  So here I am on a lovely sunny day, sitting in a crappy diesel VW half sleeping in the parking garage of Logan airport with no idea where on the planet my mother was.  I was so tired I couldn't get really worried about it.  My sister was in a near panic and I was falling asleep.  What the hell is wrong with me???  I doze off a few times.  I finally rested enough for my brain to turn back on.  I turn on the car radio and find out that we had now been at the airport of over an hour and still no sign of Mum and now my husband had been missing for over a half hour.  Of course I didn't bring my cellphone because we had done this twice before flawlessly.  We had picked Mum up with her only waiting five minutes at most.  Not so this time.  I was actually starting to worry.  Finally, after one hour and fifteen minutes at Logan my husband comes into view dragging a suitcase behind him and Mum in tow.  I jump out of the car and yell "Yay!  He found you!"  We hugged a long time and finally climbed in the car. 

It turns out the plane was horribly late.  But when my Mum got here she walked out of the upstairs floor to wait since she didn't have any checked luggage.  She was on the departures floor instead of the arrivals floor.  Hubby somehow spotted her when she went back into the lobby to find a phone to call someone to let us know where she was.  I think we are buying her a cellphone for Christmas.