What a Long, Strange Trip It Was
The trip to Detroit was planned. The side trip to Cleveland was not.
It Shouldn’t Be This Hard to Get to Detroit
Ain’t it good to be back home again? Here’s our beautiful Chicago skyline, seen just before the plane touched down at Midway Airport on Sunday. It was the end of my whirlwind trip to visit Eastern Market in Detroit (I queued up my coverage with a photo essay yesterday with much more to come). The flight left on time and was completely care-free, even arriving a few minutes early.
But my supposed-to-be nonstop flight out on Friday was… not that. It was, in fact, one of the most bizarre travel situations I’ve experienced, given that it included an unplanned diversion and nearly seven-hour layover in Cleveland. I didn’t end up sleeping in an airport, as I once did in San Francisco, but it was a close call.
I won’t name the airline because:
a) They surprised me by sending a notice on Saturday, just a day later, that passengers would receive a $250 voucher for a future flight. The crew in Cleveland gave no indication about compensation, and I assumed I would have a long phone call ahead wrangling with customer service. Good save, unnamed airline.
b) On the odd chance, I don’t want to get a cease-and-desist letter from said airline telling me to stop darkening said airline’s name.
So here’s how this trip from heck unfolded…
A Friday departure was necessary because my visit to Eastern Market would begin early in the morning. Since my plane was supposed to arrive at 4:10 p.m., I eagerly accepted the invitation by Eastern Market Partnership CEO Dan Carmody to join him and his wife for a memorable meal at Sozai, the Japanese restaurant in suburban Clawson that made chef-owner Hajime Soto a finalist for the 2023 James Beard Foundation award for the nation’s Outstanding Chef. (Sato is regarded as the originator of sustainable sushi, and I was very much looking forward to meeting and writing about him.)
The full flight of passengers was allowed to board right on time, but we sat… and sat… and sat waiting for the arrival of what appeared to be some packaged freight that the airline had contracted to fly to Detroit. And when it arrived and was loaded on, it was determined that the plane was overweight.
An airline representative boarded and announced that the airline needed three volunteers to disembark and would pay each $1,200. These things have happened before and never in a circumstance in which I didn’t need to get where I was going. Three women jubilantly took the offer. They, it turned out, were the lucky ones.
The flight finally left Midway about an hour and a half late. This would have been but a relatively minor inconvenience except… there was a storm system bearing down on Detroit. We got all the way to southeast Michigan, probably just a few minutes out from the airport, when the pilots were instructed to circle. Here’s a screenshot of our flight path from an online flight tracker. (DTW is the Detroit airport, so you can see how close we were.)
After three or four revolutions around a small city in northeast Ohio, the captain made the unwelcome announcement that the rain wasn’t going anywhere fast, and we needed to divert to Cleveland to refuel.
This is not Detroit. As you can see, there was still sunshine in Cleveland when we arrived, but guess where those storms in Detroit headed? Beeline for Cleveland. It started pouring even before the plane was completely refueled. This caused a long delay, so naturally…
… the pilots’ flight day timed out (not their fault, is a hard-and-fast airline safety rule). So the airline had to scramble to find a new flight crew. They did, but they were arriving on a flight from Nashville that had just taken off, with an expected arrival time of about 10:30 p.m. eastern.
Meanwhile, a team of ground crew folks had to deal with a planeload of pissed-off people whose plans for the day had nothing to do with Cleveland. This included a sizable group of union plumbers who were on the second leg of a trip from California to a learning intensive in Ann Arbor. While a few of them chose to rent cars and drive back to Detroit, others stayed. Fortunately they were a good-humored bunch because some of these guys were really large.
At some point, I thought if I tapped my heels together three times chanting “There’s no place like home,” I’d wake up in my bed in Chicago and realize this was all a bad dream. Alas, that didn’t work.
Instead of world-class sustainable sushi, my dinner choices were limited. The only open vendors in our part of the airport were Subway and Quaker Steak and Lube, a cheesesteak-focused chain with an unusually unappealing name. I was rescued by none other than Chicago’s own Farmer’s Fridge, which provided me with a Baja Bowl of healthy, sustainable sustenance.
The flight from Nashville arrived and as the pilot walked across to get to our plane, he was surprised by a round of applause. We boarded a bit after 11 p.m., but of course there had to be one more twist. Somehow there were two more passengers on the plane than on the manifest. So the crew had to — not making this up — do a roll call. The two people who weren’t called provided their IDs, but their information had to be entered into the system manually, which caused yet another delay.
We finally left Cleveland a few minutes after midnight, arriving back at an empty Detroit Metropolitan Airport around 1 a.m. Fortunately there were still taxis running, and I was in bed by 2. I may have been asleep before my head hit the pillow.
Luckily, my Saturday activities were perfect, I had my compensation question answered for me, and if the only thing on which I missed out was a great restaurant meal, then o.k., that’s kind of a 1st world problem. My hosts and I agreed we’d have a do-over the next time I’m in Detroit, which I hope will be soon because I want to explore the city’s expansive network of urban farms.
I’ll certainly be using that travel voucher, though I’m going to try to book the first flight out of Chicago in the morning. Just in case.