I cannot begin to explain how horrible this day has been.

It began half way decently. I was saved from a cold, lonely walk in the wee hours of the morning by a kind Dutch cabby in Amsterdam, but then was defeated for a time by the closed ticket offices (it was 5 am after all) and the money machines that didn't take the kind of plastic I had on me.

Thankfully I found an open ticket office (didn't take cards!) and an ATM machine that took VISA and I was in business again. A quick train ride to Schipol, and I thought my troubles were over. Man, when I am wrong, I am wrong.

The flight was uneventful, watched some decent movies, didn't sleep per usual of course. A little less than 9 hours later I was in the US again, going through customs in Detroit. All was well until I got to my connecting flight gate. The flight was delayed an hour and 40 minutes, which sucked, but wasn't a complete loss.

Then the great gate shuffle started. By the time I went back and forth from one side of the airport to the other a couple of times, it was close to departure time, so what else could go wrong? Yeah they cancelled the flight. Bugger. Instead of putting me on the flight that was leaving 30 minutes from that moment in time, they push me to a flight at 10 Monday morning.

It was at this moment that my crazy eye started twitching. Bad stuff happens when the crazy eye starts a twitchin'. It was here that a better man would have stoically accepted his fate and found a hotel to check into.

I can be accused of being a great many things, but being that caliber of a human being is not one of them. Also a flaminco dancer. I definitely can't be accused of being one of those. I look horrible in stretchy pants.

And so I bore down on the manager at the counter with the aforementioned crazy eye, now in full twitch mode, and explained that I hadn't seen my wife and 2 year old son in an intolerable amount of time, and I was not... enthused about having to wait another day to see them.

So intolerably long story just long, I got a flight to Cleveland that then connects to Lexington. I should be home by 10:20 this evening. Only 8 hours later than expected.

Sigh, some days it doesn't pay to travel across the pond. Know what I mean?