How to get your eldest to Australia in under 100 email posts.

What a long day. Maybe I should wait to post about this but I just checked weather.com and things look good for Rochester and Philadelphia. I'm assuming that LAX will not be a problem - sunny California and all.

Some day we will all laugh about this experience and it will be a distant memory. Right now there are two tired parents, one college student not on the plane to Melbourne, and a flurry of emails that punctuate the experience.

Thursday (stateside) or Friday morning here we found out that the American flight to Chicago (first leg) was canceled. Thus with a little help of Amex Travel a flight change to United flight to Chicago. Disaster averted happy campers.

Fly forward to Shabbat evening for us ... Friday early morning first email. S. writes there are high winds in Chicago should we look into other plans. Try to debate waking dh. Dh starts working the situation - calling American 800 number stateside.

Things become a blur but there isn't much we can do. Looks like the flight will be tight but doable. I go to sleep. I wake up early to get an email out for work and see in my email - a flurry of emails last one.. pointedly telling dh to go to bed.

Timing looking tight but still okay... my typing wakes dh. Turns out that he slept less than an hour since I woke him at midnight.

More calls to try to find out what is happening. To call an 800 number back stateside is pick up phone and dial. Pick up phone and work through work operators. One would think after the 10th time of trying to get through to AA and United they would not need the same information every time.

We slowly see the ability to connect from the United flight into Chicago to the AA flight to LAX becomes impossible. Tense times here in Oz... upset eldest in Rochester and thank goodness a very calm S. in NJ. Thank goodness her day wasn't too busy because I'm sure mucho time today was spent keeping my two eldest men in one piece and reasonable calm.

The worse moment came when we decided that there was no way N could make the connections and we wanted him reticketed to fly out the next day. We got from AMEX Travel... we can't handle it.. have to go through AA. AA saying it is out of our control - deal with United. United 800 in Australia telling us well... it looks like he can make the flights and they can't help. United in the States saying not our problem - and put us back through to AA who tried to be helpful saying we understand that the weather is causing many people to have to deal with changes.. yadda yadda. Who cares that what is happening with others.. we only care about getting our kidlet here.

After this runaround ... dh calls AMEX Travel back again and explains the ping ponging that we were getting asking if they can help out. The best news was saying they got AA (from Dallas) to put a note in N's flight that they are to get him to Melbourne. Unfortunately it does not explain that he'd have to be reticketed.

While all this is happening N. is either skyping, IM'ing, texting, & talking on his cellphone about this to us and to S. N. kept his sense of humor through 90% of this crisis and at one point says traveling by horse and buggy would be faster.

N. packs up his McDonalds & laptop and heads out of the gate area to the AA ticket agent. Unfortunately N. is so befuddled he doesn't understand what we need them to do and the note on his file is not help. Lucky for us S. is a cellphone call away and explains what we are trying to do.

This is not 9am our time - 5pm Stateside. N. has now been in the airport since just before 10am. It shakes out - angels sing - parents breathing - eldest has a headache but is ticketed for Saturday and will arrive in Melbourne Monday.

Now if I was a superstitious person, I would not publish this until we had news that N. is flying.

Fingers, toes, hairs all crossed that Monday we will have 5 people in our house.