An extra night in Traverse City

Yesterday, the air traffic control radar in Chicago stopped working right about the time we got to the Traverse City airport. This little outage affected about 10 million flights, including ours (which were canceled). We were moved to flights today and encouraged to 'have fun' in TC.

While I was working on tickets, Susan found us a room at the Comfort Inn. Not just any room, but a jacuzzi suite - complete with the jacuzzi right next to the bed! I looked at Susan, she looked at me, I winked and nodded towards the tub, she rolled her eyes and said 'don't even think about it!' It wasn't a total loss though, the room also had a 50" high def plasma TV with cable. No way a woman designed this room...

By this time, were both getting pretty hungry. There was a diner called Mabel's about 50 feet from the hotel. Instead of checking out what Mabel was cooking though, 'we' decided it would be fun to walk into TC to see what other tasty treats might be available. There was some disagreement between the two hotel desk clerks about the distance to downtown TC. One said it was a mile, the other thought it was closer to 1 1\2 miles. Turns out it was about 36 miles! (probably closer to 2-3 miles, but seemed a lot farther).

We survived the Traverse City Dinner Death March and stopped at Bubba's Bar & Restaurant. It was actually a fun spot with good food and a college bar atmosphere. We both enjoyed our food (burger, nachos) and then set out on the Traverse City Dinner Death March - Part 2. On the trip back to the hotel we had a couple of cars honking at us, then someone in an SUV threw a hat at us -- very odd.

Back at the hotel, Colleen (Asst. Manager & Angel of Mercy) was still taking good care of us. She gave us some laundry detergent and pointed us to the laundry room. Since we only had the clothes on our backs, we were eager to get our clothes clean. Then it occurred to us we needed to get to/from the laundry room while washing the only clothes we had. I'll let your imaginations guess how we pulled that one off - keep in mind we did it with only one load in the washer & dryer.

Finally, it was midnight. We had clean clothes, full tummies, and the exhaustion that came with a loooong walk to get dinner. It was off to sleep for three hours, followed by three alarms and a wake up call to be ready for our 4 AM taxi to the airport.

Now we're in Chicago waiting on the flight back to Columbus. It's been quite a travel adventure!