Thanksgiving fun and airport not

I had a good time for Thanksgiving and I probably shouldn’t write this message now because I am currently all stuck and depressed in the South Bend Airport. My ridiculously early flight got delayed (at this point…likely to be canceled) due to mechanical problems so now rather than getting back to DC at 10 am I probably won’t get there until 5 pm. Phooey. I am currently rebooked on a 1:30 pm (rather than 5:45 am) flight out of South Bend. I am still hoping that they will be able to get our original plane in the air after all and I will get to Detroit sooner than that but there may not be much hope.

Ok, enough bemoaning. Rather than dwell on that unfortunate circumstance I will write a nice long post and tell you all about my Thanksgiving. The first question you make ask is, “What is Sarah doing in South Bend, Indiana anyway?” Which I acknowledge is a good question.

I couldn’t face the long trip back to Oregon for a brief Thanksgiving holiday so I did something else fun instead. I spent Thanksgiving with Nicole at her place. Nicole, for those of you who don’t know, is one of my very good friends from college and she is currently in the final stages of finishing her PhD in medieval literature at the University of Notre Dame. Hence she is located in South Bend. It was only a four hour trip from DC to Indiana so that was pretty manageable.

I got up bright (well actually dark) and early Wednesday morning and caught my flight to Indiana. That leg of the trip went fine, and Nicole met me at the airport. It was a nice sunny day so we toured the sights of Notre Dame and I learned some of the circuitous history of the institution that leads to a university with a French names being known as the “Irish”. (Basically a lot of the clientele that were interested in a Catholic university in earlier decades were Irish Catholics because that was a lot of the Catholic population in the US in the early 20^th century.) Nicole is there because they have a Medieval Institute for the study of all things Medieval which is a great fit for her interest in early English romance manuscripts (think Arthur and the Round Table). Then we went back to the house and I took a nap. That’s what happens when I get up at 3:30 in the morning. Nicole started the Thanksgiving cooking while I was out and I helped finish the pies when I finally woke up. I made the family recipe for refrigerator rolls too.

The next day we cooked any number of fabulous things including a very large turkey. We were going to have a proper Thanksgiving, defined as yummy food and lots of it. Nicole had actually invited a number of friends to come eat with her, but most of them had other plans. So it ended up being the two of us, Leslie Ann, one of Nicole’s roommates (they share a 3 bedroom apartment), and Tanya, a friend of theirs who is finishing up her dissertation for a computer science PhD. She is doing something with mapping and modeling social interaction networks, Suzanne, so she was talking about lines and vertices like you do.

We had a ridiculous excess of food and it was all good. This meant we could spend the rest of the week eating turkey leftovers which is a wonderful thing. Here are some pictures of the Feast:

And here are the four of us afterwards; “happy and full” is the operative phrase.

Sarah

Nicole

Leslie Ann

Tanya

The rest of the weekend was a chance to hang out and catch up with each other’s lives. We knitted up a storm, and with the example of Nicole and I, started teaching Leslie Ann to knit too. We also had a marathon viewing of the new Sherlock Holmes series. This is a new British series (only one season out so far) that sets Watson and Holmes in modern London. Of course this requires some updating, Holmes has a network of homeless informants rather than street urchins and he takes taxi cabs rather than hackney carriages. Watson is chronicling their adventures in a blog rather than a magazine serial, and he is an army doctor who was discharged after being injured in…Afghanistan. I guess some things don’t require much updating at all. That probably says something profound about human history.

Friday was another nice day so we spent the afternoon at the Potawatomi Zoo. Zoos are always fun but it was an excuse to get outside as much as anything. Here is a picture of the extra-silly looking Bactrian camels. They look twice as silly as Dromedary camels because they have two humps rather than one. I think that’s the only zoo picture I have actually. But that will prove we were there. They had an excellent flock of pink flamingos (looking just like lawn ornaments!), some really funny looking Egyptian cattle with gigantic horns, several rather depressed tigers, a couple of lions, and many other expected zoo animals. The river otters looked like they were having a very good time. They had a really big bull bison named Geronimo, and he just recently got a lady friend. So they may be hoping for a cute baby bison in a year or two. Actually they have quite a lot of animals for a small zoo. It is clearly a very kid-friendly one too.

Saturday required more sleeping in. Later I went for a run around the Notre Dame campus while Nicole did a little work in her carrel. It is basically a cupboard to keep a grad student in—she does have a door which is nice so you can leave things there but not anywhere near enough floor space to distinguish it with the name of office. You would definitely not want to close the door if you were inside. That evening we watched the obligatory Notre Dame football game while knitting and eating pie. ND was playing Stanford and unfortunately they were badly overmatched.

Then we got up really early and Nicole drove me to the South Bend airport (only about 20 minutes drive) to catch my flight. Alas for me, that part of the plan didn’t go so well. I got to the airport fine but there hasn’t been much reward for sitting here so far. It is almost 9:00 and all I have to show for myself is a ham and egg croissant from the airport lunch counter. Delta gave us vouchers for $6 to use toward breakfast but that really doesn’t make up for the seven hour flight delay!

I’ll post an update this evening when I finally do get home. Maybe the saga of the faulty turn rudder will have a happy ending after all (you can see why we didn’t really want the plane to take off, even though it made us all late, broken steering doesn’t seem like a good idea).

Update: Well they've completely canceled our flight on the schedule. It looks like a wonderful day at the airport for me.

Second update: Most of the other passengers managed to get on the 11:58 flight to Detroit. Alas I did not however. I won't be leaving South Bend until 1:30. I wish I had known this sooner, but there kept being possibilities of getting out sooner, but they all fell through for me. I don't even know if I can blame Delta, it's probably just bad luck, but I still don't appreciate it.