Editor's Notebook

Commercial air flying can be challenging and last week proved that to us.

To get to our destination in Florida we first flew to Charlotte to catch a connecting flight.

The flight went without a hitch.

The problem was getting from our landing gate to the next gate.

The message board said it was a 13 minute walk.

After about 15 minutes of walking the next message board read 11 minutes to the gate.

The next board said 12 minutes as we had walked for about 20 minutes.

A long story short, the alleged 13 minute walk turned into about 35 minutes.

And that was our easy layover.

Coming back we were to fly into Dallas and have a 3 1/2 hour layover before catching the 30-minute flight into Will Rogers.

We were dreading the layover and even considered renting a car that would beat the plane back to Oklahoma City.

Little did we know that scheduled 3 1/2 hour layover would end up being a Godsend.

The scheduled flight to Dallas was delayed over 2 1/2 hours.

So when we finally landed in Dallas we had 45 minutes to catch the next plane.

If any of you have flown in or out of DFW, it is not a place where anything happens fast.

The plane took over 20 minutes to taxi to the jet bridge, which cut our time frame down to 25 minutes.

Cut off another 10 minutes or so to actually get off the plane and then there was the task of going from terminal C to terminal D and really not knowing our way around.

As we were looking at boards my sister, Missy Clark, noticed one of those people movers.

She flagged down the driver and he agreed to take us.

That helped, but our hour glass was quickly dwindling.

We had to use elevators, not once but twice, and the train ride through that enormous airport was at least another 10 minutes.

It looked like geriatric Home Alone when they strapped the four of us into what amounted to wheelchair type chairs and pushed us not only to the gate but down the jet bridge tunnel right up to the plane.

Not a minute too soon as they shut the door behind us.

Ah, commercial air travel.