It’s never a good sign when your airline sends you an email the night before your departure that says (in effect,) “The weather is going to be really dodgy tomorrow in Texas, so if you want to change your travel plans, we will be extremely generous and waive the regular change fee.” It’s doubly bad when you’re connecting through Dallas (as in Texas,) triply bad when you read it 5 minutes before you go to bed, and quadruply bad when you have a whole host of pre-scheduled items on the arrival end like reservations on a train and a plan to meet an agent to get the keys to an apartment.

Needless to say, I didn’t get a great night’s sleep.

But the morning broke dark and foreboding and so all those little problems were merrily washed away by the unexpected downpour that came as soon as we stepped out to feed the horses. The flight was on time per the American Airlines app, and the weather at DFW was “rainy with a possibility of thunderstorms.” In other words, a crappy night’s sleep for nothing.

The night before, I’d seen a Facebook posting from the airport authority informing travelers that they shouldn’t even bother trying to find a spot in the airport garage. Now we always park there, gladly accepting the expense for the ability to walk off the plane and go straight to the ride home without waiting for anything or anybody. This called for a change to a long-held and dear tradition, in other words finding somewhere to park off-site. The internet came to the rescue with each of the parking lots known to me presenting their wares. I chose the big one just off the airport road and booked it. It was about ½ the price of the on-site parking so I figured it was almost going to be a “You get what you pay for” proposition, but I was very pleasantly surprised when arrived, found a spot and jumped right on a shuttle that was waiting for us as I locked the car. Two minutes later we were dropped at the entrance and on our way to security.

Last year we decided to spring for Global Entry as a way to take some of the waiting out of the process. MLW was approved two months before I was so we didn’t get to use it on our trip to Amsterdam last May. This trip was a first for the two of us together, with Global Entry and we were a bit excited to reap the benefits of the wait for approval. Imagine our surprise when we were steered into the Pre-check area and into a line that was actually longer than the regular queue. It was an instant example of an outcome of those hundreds of “Why don’t you spring for Pre-check” articles I’d seen over the last year on Facebook, and the “Hey you, come over here and get Pre-check” counter they’ve set up in every Staples in the US. I will admit though, that the line appeared to move faster than the other, and I didn’t have to take off my shoes or dump all my electronics, which was great, at least until I stepped into the metal detector and the agent said, “Metal knee, huh” before shuffling me off to the side for a more thorough scan. Once scanned, we were on our way to discovering that we were delayed a half hour. Maybe a big deal, maybe not.

We boarded at 12:45 and backed away from the gate at 1:15. The we stopped. And sat. For a long time, informed every once in a while that DFW was shut down due to horrendous thunderstorms and that every plane flying there was being held at its origin. The pilot laid the whole thing at the feet of the FAA and said we’d probably wait an hour. Which we did, plus an extra 15 minutes, finally getting in the air at 2:30. And so began the next one and a half hours of iterative mathematics, being done in my head, calculating based on a known flight time, with a one-hour time change, and an unspecified transfer time on the Sky Link, whether or not we would make our 6:30 departure time for Madrid, given that they’d start boarding at 5:45 and lock the doors at 6:15. Not that there was a single thing I could do about it, but it’s good to start wondering if an airport hotel is in your near future.

But it was not to be. Unsurprisingly, that flight also was delayed an hour so the transfer window was more than adequate. As a side note, we actually did make it to the next gate with about 10 minutes to spare against the original boarding time. Breaking today’s string of luck, the flight did leave only an hour late but the calculated time of arrival only added 15 minutes to the original time. Good news for a change, and now the human calculator shifts to estimating the projected arrival time, plus the time needed to exit the airport, plus the cab ride to Atocha station in Madrid, and whether we can still make the 11:53 train reservation I’d booked last month with a smaller time window than we’d done in the past because “Every time we did this previously, we ended up sitting around for two hours.” Worst case, some time spent with Renfe customer service trying to reschedule.

We’ll see, maybe the tailwind over the mighty Atlantic will buy us some time.