The 4:00 alarm sounded – blat, blat, blat, blat. After quick showers, we loaded the car and checked out. The rain and the snow from the night before had frozen on the car, making the doors difficult to open. Fortunately, the locks didn’t freeze.

The airport wasn’t crowded and we moved quickly through security. Bozeman is in the same situation as Harrisburg and probably most small airports across the country. They had to put their explosive detection machines in the lobby. Bozeman is handling their setup a little smarter than Harrisburg, however. At Bozeman, security takes your bags to scan them while you are in line. Once you give them your bags, you are not allowed to touch them again. When they are finished, security takes your bags over to the counter where the ticket agent tags them and places them on the conveyor, resulting in a lot less handling of the bags than what we experienced at Harrisburg. They use the swab type detection machines, running a swab over the zippers and handles. They did open our ski bag, saying that their policy is to hand-inspect all ski equipment. We use tie wraps to make sure the zippers stay closed and the security agents had to cut it open. They did take another one from us and put it on the zipper when they were done. All-in-all, security was very friendly and a lot less uptight than they had been in the last year.

Since it was so early, we were not able to see much on the flight to Salt Lake City, but we did get to see the lights of West Yellowstone and the much dimmer lights of Old Faithful off in the distance. We grabbed a quick breakfast from the Sbarro’s at the airport. Fortunately, we only had to move down one gate, so we didn’t have to rush around.

We named the flight from Salt Lake City the family special, since there were a lot of families with very young children, including at least 8 infants. The infants were surprisingly good; only one (thankfully in the next section to the front) was very fussy. We were fortunate to see another glory (thanks for the term DG), this time framing the shadow of the plane.

As we were coming down for the landing in Cincinnati, we could see the snow-covered fields. Everything was going great. We watched the runway approach and were anticipating the lurch as the wheels touched down, but we felt the vibrations of the engines going into full throttle instead. The landing was aborted for some unknown reason. When we were airborne again, the pilot announced that we were going to circle the airport and try to land again. This was uneventful, but it did take about 15 minutes, which we desperately needed to make our connection. Lew talked to the pilot as we were deplaning and he said there was another plane crossing our runway causing the aborted landing.

We made our flight to Harrisburg with about 10 minutes to spare before they called boarding. We really had about 10 minutes more, because they forgot to unlock the door to the tarmac so that we could board. An airport employee finally noticed that we were queued up and went out to check what was going on. She got the OK from the pilot to let us through. The flight was smooth and we soon had Round Top Ski Resort, the Susquehanna, and TMI in sight. After a short wait for our bags and a quick shuttle to our truck, we were on our way to a grand reunion with Heidi at my mother’s house. We finally got home at 8 pm and fell into bed, dreading the return to work in the morning.