Sometimes trips for flight attendant crews don’t always go the way they are scheduled. Because our industry is at the hands of Mother Nature and a stopwatch, trips often change. Sometimes they end up working out for flight attendants, other times not so much. This is where flexibility in our profession is a must.
 This latest trip was one that worked out in our favor. It was a three day trip that was supposed to have us flying for 17 hours with layovers in Minneapolis and Tampa. Instead, an airplane emergency and snow changed around our trip.
    The first day was great. My crew and I briefed for the three days at our home domicile in Los Angeles. It was a great crew and I was looking forward to the trip.
 Our trip on paper was supposed to be the following: Day 1 = Los Angeles to Chicago, then on to Minneapolis for the night. Day 2 = Minneapolis to Chicago, then to Tampa, Florida for the night. Then Day 3 = Tampa, Washington DC, sit for three long hours, then work our final flight home to the West Coast. 
 Day one flew as scheduled. We landed that night in an ugly snowstorm in Minneapolis. That would be our temporary home for the night. With the snow heavily falling when we landed about 7 p.m., I was really looking forward to getting to my hotel room, taking a warm shower, then putting on my pajamas and climbing into bed. After all, we only had an 11 hour layover there that night and needed to be back at the airport for an early morning departure back to Chicago.
 My blaring alarm clock wake up call came much too early. I looked out my room window and saw that much more snow had fallen overnight, turning everything into a white, winter wonderland.
 So we get to the airport, only to find that our 6:51 a.m. flight was now delayed because of what is called “flow control” by the air traffic controllers that guide our plane from city to city. With weather bad both in Chicago and Minneapolis, they had to space airplanes out between the cities for safe take-offs and approaches.
 So we finally boarded our plane, got our passengers settled for the 54 minute flight, only to have a longer wait to be de-iced. Well that turned into a fiasco in itself. Halfway through the de-icing process, the truck doing the job ran out of the fluid to finish the job. So there we waited, and waited, for it to get another batch of de-icing fluid and return to our  snow covered aircraft.
 Well the process finally completed, but now we were almost an hour behind schedule. Once in the air, the short 54 minute flight ended up being an hour and a half flight. As we got closer to Chicago, our friendly air traffic controllers put us in a holding pattern somewhere over Illinois. Apparently, with the snow falling at O’Hare International Airport, a plane decided to slide off the end of the runway and basically crippled departures and arrivals there until the mess was cleaned up.
 As we circled in the sky, my captain gave me a computer generated message from our airline’s crew desk, asking me to call the operation when we landed. I knew this couldn't’t be good. With our late departure and delay in the air, I knew we had already missed our connecting flight to Tampa.
 This is where things can go bad. My crew and I wondered what the crew desk had in store for us. Would we be flying a longer duty day? Would we end up someplace where none of us wanted to be? Would our nice trip fall apart and turn into a horrible one? These are all questions flight attendants wonder when we misconnect during our regular trip.
 Unfortunately, for us, they had us work another flight down to Orlando, then back up to Washington DC, where we would over night and pickup the remainder of our trip on the Day 3. What was supposed to be a six hour duty day, now turned  into a 13 hour duty day.
 But as I mentioned before, sometimes broken trips end up working out for us. But on this one, there was some give and take. Instead of a long 20 hour layover in Tampa, we got to spend 20 hours in freezing and snowing Washington DC. The upside was that we would not have to wake up early on the east coast for our Day 3. Instead, we got to sleep in and catch our only flight for the day from Washington DC home to LA. And our 17 hours of flying over three days turned into 19 hours. So we were able to pickup a few extra hours of flight pay.
   Depending how you look at it, it turned out rather well for my crew. We made it home safely, and that is all that matters.