#648 – Engulfed by Biloxi #18 – Escape From Biloxi, Part II

I called the airline about returning home Saturday instead of Sunday. I knew there would be some nominal penalty for altering my ticket, but on a one-way return on a trip that originally cost only $400, how much more could it be?

Try $1,500. That’s actually the cost of a new one-way ticket from Gulfport, through Dallas, to Phoenix. The lady from the airline also informed me, “In addition, you are responsible for a $150 change fee.”

Fifteen hundred dollars AND a change fee? What was the change fee for? To make sure after they max out my credit card they go after my loose change?

But I needed to find some way home. I already told Jo Anne I was coming home early and, after forcing her to handle various family crises solo for a week, that essentially amounted to a promise to return. Jo Anne also told me some good friends from Chicago were in town and if I hurried home we could get together.

I hung up on the agent. I figured if I stayed on the line any longer, she would probably offer to mate with me and kill me. Besides, Gulfport wasn’t the only game in town. New Orleans was just 100 miles away.

Four hundred dollars later – the price of my original ROUND-TRIP ticket – a budget airline was willing to allocate me a seat on the Saturday morning flight. Now all I needed was transportation to the New Orleans Airport. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I take pride in having visited almost every one of the fifty states and this could give me a chance to cross off Louisiana.

The problem with that, however, was that my criteria for “visiting” a state is that I be there long enough to have at least one story to tell.

I needn’t have worried on that account.

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