Do you think I have vacation envy?

My Aunt arrived on Friday. Actually she is my great Aunt but she is only 65 and I have grown up with her as an Aunt. I love her, she is a lot of laughs, very fun and energetic for her age (or any age really - she walks 5-7 kilometres a day).

She often comes to visit me and I often go to visit her (she's only 1.5 hour drive away) but this time she was coming because on Sunday she was going to Florida for a month, during which time she will go on a week long Caribbean cruise.

I love vacations and I have been longing for some sun during the long boring and very cold winter. And did I mention I love vacations... and sun!

Anyway, her flight was 9:00 pm last evening. The airport is 50 kilometres from my house. ON the weekend when there is no traffic it is a 30 minute drive. The forecast was calling for bad weather on Sunday but most of the day it was quite nice. About 4:00 though it started to snow and it occured to me that we should leave early for the airport. We are used to snow driving (grew up in a place were we usually accumulated 5-8 feet of snow over the course of the winter), we have an all wheel drive vehicle and winter tires, but I figured we should count on the drive being a little longer because of the weather. What I didn't count on was traffic.

We decided to leave at 7:15. She had already checked in online and had a boarding pass so all we needed to do was check her baggage and get her to security. Well.....

When we got to the highway the traffic was backed up just like a weekday rush hour. We crawled along the highway at 30 kilometres an hour. Our 30 minute drive took 1 hour and 45 minutes and we got to the airport at 9:00 pm. That's right, we got there at 9:00 pm for her 9:00 flight. We decided to keep going and not turn back because there was a good chance the same weather might delay her flight. Well.... we were in luck. The flight was delayed and not scheduled to leave until 10:50, however, customs closed at 9:00 and because she couldn't clear customs, she couldn't catch her flight! I felt terrible. I have never missed a flight, I have never made anyone miss their flight and I have taken lots of people to the airport. I am generally a punctual person (although My Reality may disagree with that based on my arrival to the spa on Friday night!).

Anyway... we got her rebooked on a flight that left 10:00 this morning. We left her luggage with the secure storage at the airport because she has recently injured her shoulder so neither her or I could left it into or out of the car. I told her that on a weekday morning we should leave lots of time to get to the airport. I suggested we leave at 7:00, that way even if we crawled along the highway again, we would still be there in plenty of time.

WRONG.... I totally underestimated how clogged the highway could get when it was log jammed with people who were afraid to drive in the snow. It took us 2 hours!!! We got to the airport and 9:00, which would have been fine if we could have gone straight to the counter and check in (you must check in to international flights 45 minutes ahead of time). But we had to go pick up her luggage. And wouldn't you know it, they couldn't find her luggage. We had to wait 20 minutes. We got to the check in line at 9:20 (the line was huge but I informed one of the agents that we were trying to catch a flight for 10:00) only to be told that we had again missed the flight as the check in for that flight was closed.

We had to book her on another flight for 4:20 and I refused to bring her back home and return her to the airport because I could not handle being responsible for her missing yet another flight. So my poor, dear great Aunt waited in the airport for 6 hours. I stayed as long as I could but I had to leave around 11:30.

Do you think that subconsciously I was too jealous to get her to the airport on time? I have lived here almost 3 years by now, it is getting a little old to say that I just had no idea traffic could/would be like that!