Few things in life are predictable, and traveling is certainly not one of them.  Traveling as a string quartet we have learned several things that make the experience smoother: try to leave on the first flight out because you’ll have a better chance of getting to your destination, never argue with the flight attendants when they tell you your violin/viola won’t fit in the overhead (just ask in your sweetest voice “would you mind if I just try it?”), always play dumb when they lecture you on where the cello needs to sit, and sleep whenever you can.  No matter how much we try to make travel a good experience, there are always factors out of our control.

For example: each of us had been on the road for differing amounts of time when we left Boston last week to come back to Nebraska.  I had spent Thanksgiving with my family down in Houston, so my baby daughter and I had been traveling for a full two weeks.  After the Thanksgiving holiday our quartet spent a week in residence at Harvard, then went out to western Massachusetts to play at Smith College and do a mini residency there.

We first heard about what promised to be a terrible blizzard a day before we were heading home.  We were all sitting in the lounge at Smith College hanging out with our babies and groaning about how it would be typical that after such a tiring trip we would get stuck at one airport or another for hours on end.  We figured out that since Jonah was connecting from Boston to Newark, he could stay with his parents in New York if he couldn’t get to Omaha.  And since I was connecting through Houston, I could stay with my parents if need be.  Greg and Julie were flying direct to Kansas City, so they had flexibility if they needed to stay put before attempting to drive home.  Problem solved?

All but one of those plan B travel scenarios ended up happening.  Jonah was the only one who actually got home on that crazy blizzard day.  His plane was the last to land before the Omaha airport was shut down for 24 hours due to serious blizzard conditions, high winds and the like.  He drove slowly from Omaha to Lincoln but was caught for the last ten minutes in a pure “white-out.”  Greg and Julie got to KC but were stranded in a hotel in St. Joseph, MO because highways were closed.  I was stuck (but pleasantly so, because of family) in Houston for two days trying to get home.  After three trips to the airport (they kept canceling the flights as I got there), I finally got on the last flight out of Houston, the rest of my tired family met me in the airport, and we arrived at our house after 1 am…

This travel story is just one of many we’ve experienced as a quartet, and these days we just throw up our hands and know that eventually we will get to our destination.  I think of the dozens upon dozens of hours we’ve spent at O-Hare (who hasn’t); the time we were rerouted to Baltimore from LaGuardia and had to take a train into the City; the time the flight attendants wouldn’t let Greg take his cello on a flight so we had to fly to a different city, take a car service to a concert and walk on stage in our street clothes…the list goes on.

As we snuggle into our cozy homes, the temperatures drop to -10 tonight, and the road crews have still not plowed the mountains of snow on our side streets here in Lincoln, I am grateful to be back home.