Surprising holiday travel issues

Every year since 2017, during the holidays, I have flown either from Minnesota to the east coast for the holidays to visit my family, or vice versa to visit my in-laws.
I’ve run into some hiccups, during those years, with the worst situation to date, being a few hours late, while my wife was stuck at her parents — sick, during Covid as I traveled back to Rhode Island for work.
Ever since moving to Minnesota originally, I have kept in mind that traveling during the winter would present challenges with weather, so my wife and I always factor in at least one extra day before we have to go back to work.
This year, we ended up deciding on taking a Sun Country flight back home the Saturday after Christmas.
The weather was generally fine the whole week, and then Saturday morning rolled around, and we were getting ready to catch the Uber I had scheduled in advance, when I read the dreaded email: ‘flight canceled.’
After calling the customer service number, they told us it was due to a maintenance issue. Fine. We would take the next Sun Country flight out the next day, from Boston.
We took advantage of the extra day in Rhode Island, and Sunday came, it was a seasonally warm day, but foggy.
Like we had planned on doing the day before, we got in the Uber to drive us about an hour north to the airport.
Checking in, and going through security took no time, so we were able to relax for a while.
Eventually we had to change gates, which seemed like it would be the only inconvenience of the day.
After a little bit, it was announced that they were delaying our flight a couple of hours. No problem. I will watch the game somewhere and get some work done.
I was sitting next to someone who was heading back to the Twin Cities after visiting a brother on the east coast. I quickly became public enemy number one for everyone sitting near us when I said loudly enough that the flight had been canceled altogether.
I gathered my stuff, and quickly found my wife, who was catching up on some sleep.
We went and got our luggage, while on the way calling our parents. My parents wanted to make sure we were able to get out of town, and my in-laws were watching our dog, and also we had to go pick up our car in Mankato when we got back in.
For those who haven’t flown to Boston before, they have several buses that take you to various train stations — similar to the light rail.
I knew our best option would be to book a flight from Rhode Island’s airport, which is about two miles down the road from my parents’ house, so we get on the bus to the train station, where we could get on the commuter rail to get to Rhode Island.
We only had a few hours before we would have to catch a Southwest flight from Warwick, so we decided to just take an Uber to my parents instead.
After regrouping, and having a bite to eat, we got a ride to the airport, which is about half the size of Terminal 1 in Minneapolis. Needless to say, we had plenty of time on our hands.
Unfortunately, it is hard to get direct flights out of this airport to Minneapolis during the winter, so we had to make a stop at BWI airport. We figured there would be more food options there but of course, 9:30 p.m. on a Sunday, there weren’t many options open, and the ones that were only had limited options.
But we made do, at least we were just one flight away from at least getting to Minnesota.
Around 1 a.m. last Monday, we made it home, and that morning we were able to get our car and our dog Finn.
Thankfully, overall, everything worked out for us, but I am still shocked that my first major issue traveling wasn’t over the snow.