"Look for the helpers"
Before beginning, let me say I am acutely aware that what follows is a first world problem. On Monday, October 18, we arrived at Minneapolis-St. Paul airport at 3:30 a.m. for a trip to St. Maarten with the first of our helpers, our dear friends Jeff and Jackie, who invited us to share in their vacation. An indication that perhaps this adventure might be going awry was that as we pulled up to the curb, we noticed that the Delta section of the terminal--and only the Delta section--was semi-illuminated in emergency lighting. A power outage had not only dimmed the lights but was preventing Delta from checking in and boarding the milling passengers. So far we're not too worried. There's an hour between our scheduled arrival into Atlanta and the connecting flight to St. Maarten. Tick...tick...tick... No power. No computers booting up. Delta agents huddling, doing their best to problem solve the situation. Sometime after 5 am, an agent announces we are movi...