Blizzard 2009 - How We Escaped

There has been some talk about the heavy snowfalls the North-East Coast of the USA is going to experience this weekend but by the time we wake up on Saturday morning the warnings have been upgraded to BLIZZARD and the storm is now predicted to hit New York at about the time our 330pm American Airlines flight leaves for San Francisco. Yikes!

We frantically get on the phone to see if we can get an earlier flight out. No luck.Thousands of holiday travellers have beaten us to it and all the early flights have gone. At this stage our flight is still leaving on time -remarkably.

We're just going to have to sit it out at the airport and pray we can take off from JFK on time

We get nervous when they cancel the 6pm flight to San Francisco which is just after ours. Don't like the idea of spending the night marooned at the airport.

Miraculously at 430pm we push away from the gate after our plane is 'de-iced'.

We arrive in San Francisco 6 hours later to the news that the blizzard hit hard closing several airports in Washington, New York and Baltimore. Over 1500 flights had to be cancelled stranding tens of thousands of holidaymakers. Our flight was one of the last to get out.

I put it down to the Irish luck of Mark FitzGerald!

Fingers crossed our Qantas flight to Sydney from San Francisco late tonight is not affected by the backlog of cancelled flights and we get home in time for Christmas.