What a canceled flight, Canadian wildfire smoke, and a fifth wheel I couldn’t reach taught me about living and working on the road. Written by Stefan.
Thursday, 5 p.m., MSP
There I sat, laptop hot-spotted, searching for ways to get back to meet the family in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with a hard deadline in Wisconsin the next day. I was returning from a whirlwind 48-hour trip from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to New York City and back. It seemed like an easy enough trip, with a few connecting stops on the way, and then we’d pack up and head for our final big destination of the summer: Oshkosh for our family’s first big weeklong EAA AirVenture airshow experience.
Except now I was sitting at Minneapolis airport, trying to figure out how to get back “home” to the middle of nowhere. I was 400 miles away with all flights in the right direction canceled and no rental cars available anywhere.
Funny enough, this was supposed to be our travel-free week, where we could all just sit back and relax.
When Plans Go Out the Window
When planning our long trips, we are mindful of the ebb and flow of business and when travel may be required. Usually, July is extra quiet, particularly the first week. The kids are off from school, and clients are on vacation, so we thought it would be a great time to slip away into the wilderness as we’d done in recent years. This year, we had our eye on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
We didn’t have grand plans for the week; just a bit of family time and exploring at this off-the-beaten-path stop in between our remote-working 9-5 schedule from a tree-free campsite.
We didn’t really realize it until we were there, but Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is about as remote as it gets east of the Mississippi, with only a few regional airports sprinkled throughout. From our location at Bay Ridge RV Park in Garden, MI, the closest regional airport, Delta County Municipal Airport in Escanaba, MI, was only a little over an hour drive away. There is no rideshare service active in the area, so it meant Tiffany would have to give me a lift.
Getting the call: Two Nights in New York
We’ve often learned that the best-laid plans tend to be just that: plans. My professional life often requires me to jump on a plane to meet someone, somewhere, at the last moment. That’s why we make sure even our remote stops are within a reasonable driving distance of a regional airport. Something inevitably pops up.
The call came on Monday morning. “Can you come over to New York tomorrow and stay until Thursday morning?” For a client event – of course!
Surprisingly, flying from Delta County Airport in Escanaba was actually quite convenient, although there was only one flight to NYC with a decent connection in Detroit. The Escanaba airport has a single commercial gate, with a lounge the size of a large living room, and leaving Escanaba at 6.13 am for the short hop to Detroit was a breeze.
In Detroit, I had a quick transfer and just 5 hours later I was in Manhattan. The experience couldn’t have been smoother, and the meetings passed quickly! But unfortunately, the smoothness wasn’t meant to last.
Natural Disasters and Travel Inconveniences
A smoke storm of epic proportions was brewing in the form of Canadian wildfires, and trying to head right into the smokiest areas in Northern Michigan actually wasn’t the easiest task when it came time. While I’d been dodging most of the smoke since I’d arrived in New York, my family had been living with very smoke-filled days back in the Upper Peninsula.
My return flight with Delta Airlines was routed from Newark to Minneapolis to Escanaba, with a comfortable 2-hour layover. I was happy for the long-ish layover because making the Escanaba flight was critical, as there is only one flight per day on that route, and not even every day.
The plan had been simple: I’d fly home from New York on Thursday afternoon, leaving Friday as a buffer, and we’d all head to Oshkosh together on Saturday morning. I normally move mountains to get home to “my girls” as quickly as possible after a business trip, but this time I REALLY needed to get home and not making the Escanaba flight was an actual problem, not just an inconvenience.
The moment I stepped into the departure hall at Newark Airport, I received a message that my Minneapolis flight was delayed by more than 1.5 hours, now making the connection tight. To make matters worse, it didn’t look like there was any movement on the inbound flight at all.
So, with my original flight teetering dangerously close to the “point of no return” for making my Minneapolis connection, I searched for another flight. The only one available was scheduled to arrive at 1:45 p.m., and the connection to Escanaba left at 2:10 p.m. A 25-minute buffer (and an inbound plane already on its way) seemed like a much better option than a delayed flight with an inbound plane that still showed no sign of movement.
I rebooked and felt pretty smug when my flight landed in Minneapolis, because my original flight was still on the ground in NY. The connecting flight to Escanaba was just a few gates away, and life was looking good…until it wasn’t!
Gaming Out The Scenarios
Although the wildfire smoke had worked in our favor for most of the day, the plane to Escanaba was hopelessly oversold, and no one wanted to sell their seat on this tiny plane, which was one of the few going to the U.P. until tomorrow. It caused a ton of delays at boarding, and before it could ever be resolved, the flight was canceled due to smoke.
It was now just past 5 p.m. The question quickly became: Do I stay or do I go? And if I go, how?
Tiffany and I huddled up on the phone and quickly went over our immediate options. And when our quick huddle and travel option searches yielded more questions than answers, there was only one thing to do: find a hotel for the night to hunker down and plan the next steps. That’s why we planned for a buffer day, after all.
Having your travel interrupted when returning to a sticks-and-bricks home is a hassle, but it’s normal. When your home is on wheels, though, and you’re traveling full time, there are more issues to consider: Travel dates, campground reservations, fixed events that can’t be moved – and, more importantly, what is the most convenient location to reunite?
Being in a very remote area of the Upper Peninsula made many of the options we considered unworkable. For example, the only one-way car rental option available was a U-Haul rental at the bargain price of $700+.
Keeping to Our Deadline
We knew the mission: “The Girls” would have to leave Garden, MI by Saturday 9 am to make it to Oshkosh, WI with a safety buffer for our daughter’s mandatory attendance at an aviation mentorship program starting Sunday.
That meant they’d need to pack up everything themselves and hitch up the fifth-wheel. And that’s when we realized the huge flaw in our otherwise very efficient RV tear-down process: although we have been traveling full-time for almost a year, with dozens of camp breakdowns and setups, we have never done each other’s jobs. And they had never fully been part of the outside breakdown and hitching process.
May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor
The priority shifted from finding my travel options to making sure Tiffany and Mackenzie knew every detail and quirk about hitching up the RV. (Let’s be real, every RV has its own quirks.) If they needed to head on the road by themselves, I wanted to make sure they would be safe in case I didn’t make it home on time.
Second, once the girls received a phone crash course on RV hitching and safety, it was time to focus on travel plans. Since finding a car rental option to Garden, MI was futile, we came up with the following plan:
- Option A) Hope, pray, and keep our fingers crossed that the wildfire smoke would dissipate (weather forecasts made that unlikely) and I would make it on the single overbooked Friday flight (for which I only had a standby ticket). It was a long shot, but by far the best option.
- Option B) Tiffany and Mackenzie would get the RV ready as scheduled on Saturday morning and head toward Oshkosh. If Option A hadn’t panned out, I would have had 18 hours to make my way to Green Bay (much better flight options, and one-way rental cars) to “intercept” them on their way to Oshkosh.
When I made it to the airport Friday morning, my hopes were low – the wildfire smoke had thickened overnight, and there was already a large group of passengers waiting at the gate. Many more passengers than the 40ish persons the small regional jet could carry.
I was already mentally inventorying the next steps to set Option B in motion when I received a push notification on my phone that I had an assigned seat. And the smoke situation was OK enough to make the flight. In the end, it took almost 34 hours to get from NY to Escanaba. Ironically, it would have taken about half the time had I driven from NY.
8 Lessons Learned from the Week That Wasn’t Travel Free
Travel delays happen, and when you get the call to travel on short notice from the most remote part of your trip, the hassle factor for delays is even more pronounced. It means coordinating awkward tasks in awkward locations with sparse travel options. A missed flight between Houston and New York, with dozens of daily options, is not nearly as quirky as a flight to a remote location with few travel options. In this case, we got lucky, but luck favors the prepared.
Here are a few things we learned from this little adventure of delayed flights and pressing deadlines:
- Who goes where. When returning home from a business trip to a fixed, sticks-and-bricks house, the answer is simple: whoever is traveling figures out how to get back home. When travel plans are synchronized, and deadlines are fixed, it’s sometimes easier for the group to reunite somewhere else. Keeping things flexible is a huge help.
- Don’t pack too light. For the past 25 years I have always carried clothes for an extra day, and I honestly can’t remember ever using them until this trip. Even more practical than clothes, it always pays dividends not to skimp on chargers, even when you anticipate not needing them.
- Sometimes the best choice is not doing anything. I am the type of person who can’t sit still. If it doesn’t move me closer to my destination, it’s not an option I want to even consider. So, for this trip, my initial thoughts were, “What can I do to get home tonight?” When going to a remote area, sometimes that’s just not viable. In this case, a night spent in the comfort of a hotel, followed by a flawless trip the next day, was the best option.
- Build slack into anything that can’t be moved. If I hate one thing in life, it’s feeling rushed or frazzled. Sometimes a tight schedule has too little wiggle room, but if possible, leaving yourself a little time between important appointments makes life a lot easier, especially when traveling to more remote areas with only very limited flight options. A canceled flight can easily throw your schedule back 24 hours.
- A team is only as good as the slack they can pick up. This was probably our biggest problem in this scenario. Moving a fifth wheel safely is not difficult, but it gets harder if, the first time you do it, you don’t have a guide. While everyone in our family knows, in theory, what the others are doing, nobody knew the entire process and its quirks. Have a checklist (here is the one we use) and make sure everyone can do all the necessary steps. Practice it from time to time and change up the roles so you know everyone is capable and ready if the time comes to step up.
- Status makes things easier. I usually travel with United Airlines whenever reasonably possible (or economically feasible) and have a decent level of frequent-flyer status with them, which gives me a higher chance of making it on an oversold flight. For this trip, only Delta Air Lines was available, and I don’t enjoy status there.
- The on-the-road office. Just because travel plans might be nutty, work never stops. A lot of delays are just waiting around airport terminals and hotels. My messenger bag is my “office on the road”. I make sure I can work from anywhere, because when travel is already stressful, nobody needs additional headaches when a colleague needs “something really quick” and you can’t help out.
- Sometimes you just need a little luck. We game-planned out so many options, and in the end, the thing we thought least likely to happen did. It was mostly just luck and perhaps divine intervention. Tiffany asked me multiple times if I was serious when I said I had gotten that confirmation that I was flying on Friday because she just couldn’t believe it.
We Made It (With Time to Spare)
On Saturday morning, we pulled out of Bay Ridge RV Park right on schedule, together, with me hitching up the fifth wheel and the girls closely watching. We rolled into Oshkosh that afternoon, and Mackenzie started her mentorship program Sunday morning just like we’d planned. The week we’d worried about turned into one of the highlights of our summer, and all the travel stress melted away.
Would I want to do those 34 hours again? Not a chance. But I wouldn’t trade what we learned. The girls now know our hitching routine as well as I do, and “I’m sure it’ll be fine” is no longer part of our travel plans.
Life on the road doesn’t give you fewer curveballs. It gives you different ones, often in places with one gate and one flight a day. You can’t control the smoke, the overbooked flights, or the phone call on Monday morning. What you can control is how ready your team is when those things happen.
Your turn: Have you ever had to piece together a way home to your RV? Or had someone else take over hitching for the first time? Tell us in the comments. We’d love to hear how it went.
And if you only take one thing from this post, grab our RV breakdown and hitching checklist and have everyone in your crew run through it once. You’ll be glad you did.
