Inclement weather

I'm quite used to inclement weather in Midwest. I've written about it in my Cold and Adaptation post. When I was in Toledo, inclement weather rarely disrupted my life much. It hardly even stopped me from biking. But that's when you're at the safety of your home. Calling a city home in a foreign country may sound funny, but that's how I felt about Toledo.

But when you're traveling and cannot enjoy the amenities and security of being at home, life could feel rough. Especially, when you don't know when you will be secure again. Whenever such things happened and I watched people stranded at airports en route their home, I felt sympathy for them and I wished it never happened to me. But it did happen to me last night.

I was heading for Toledo to meet my professors and friends and also to enjoy Christmas at my hometown. And being in a small town in the middle of nowhere, getting anywhere is a challenge, even if it's not too far away. And it takes 570 miles to get to Toledo. That means taking a train for Chicago (5.5 hours) and then wait there for some time (2 hours or more, depending on your itinerary) and then take a bus for Toledo (another 5.5 hours). Even if you catch a flight from Chicago, it doesn't make much difference considering the time it takes to get to airport from downtown Chicago, early check-in, security, etc. And I have a very low opinion about any town that doesn't have a functioning commercial airport nearby (like Carbondale). Either way, you lose a whole day.

To save time, I had taken the afternoon train in Carbondale to catch the midnight bus in Chicago shortly and arrive in Toledo the next morning. I knew about the stormy weather, but I had no idea that buses could get canceled. I had traveled in stormy weather before and assumed those cancellations were only for airplanes. I was wrong.

I arrived at the bus stop near Union Station just to find that all buses had been canceled. I asked the Megabus agent what should I do in such weather at midnight in Chicago. And there were other people like me. He took us aboard his bus and tried to find us a hotel. It took him quite some time to find somebody answering his desperate phone calls without much success.

And we enjoyed having a free tour around downtown Chicago, while he was trying to find rooms for us without much assistance from Megabus customer service. I tried to comfort myself by enjoying Christmas lightings (I enjoy lightings under any condition), although I was very tired (sitting in an overcrowded train for about 6 hours was not much fun) and I was badly in need of some sleep and also badly stressed about missing office hours over Friday in Toledo as a result of this misfortune.

After about 3 hours wandering around downtown Chicago, he could find somebody in their customer service to accept paying for our hotel and we landed in Hampton Inn Suites for the night. It took us about another hour to actually check in and get some sleep. I appreciate the efforts of this guy and his colleague who arrived in the hotel to pay for our rooms, but when a transportation company cancels their scheduled trips, shouldn't they be responsible for stranded passengers who transfer from one vehicle to another in the middle of night? That was the most annoying thing whenever I watched news coverage of passengers stranded in the airports.

But as the saying goes, all is well that ends well. Thanks to the efforts of this guy and help from his colleague, we could enjoy our night at Hampton Inn. And it reminded me of my stopovers in Bahrain over my trips back and forth to Nicosia two years ago. And while I was walking under heavy snow of Chicago, I was thinking of one of my favorite songs, Snows of New York.