I'd like to share with you the tale of my escape from Portland.
Between Friday and Sunday 8~10 inches of snow fell on Portland, royally screwing things up. The cold killed off my already weak car battery leaving me in the hands of public transit for getting around. Sunday this was fine, but on Monday, an hour after I arrived at work, service on my route was cancelled. In order to get home, I had to take a bus that got me within a mile of my house, and then hiked the rest of the way home.
The snow was deep. (And largely non-shovelled and non-compressed.)
Tuesday the snow had stopped falling, but the roads were still covered in snow. My bus route was still cancelled. Airport shuttles were not running, and taxis would only pick you up if you were medical personnel trying to get to a hospital.
Tuesday also happened to be the day I was flying out. This lack of easy transit nearly had me thinking I was going to have to hike to the airport, which would have...well, it would have sucked hard, and probably would have kept me from leaving. After some serious research into the status of various bus and MAX lines, I eventually found a way to get to the airport.
It took a half mile snow hike (with luggage), a bus down Lombard to the MAX yellow line, a shuttle that was running to supplement the yellow line because the switches were frozen, two more MAX lines (blue to Gateway, Red to the airport) and a total of two hours to get to the airport.
Thankfully I gave myself 7 hours to get from my house to catch my flight, so I still had 5 hours to kill. Also working in my favor: I wasn't the only one who had a hard time getting to the airport.
Because of this... shall we say... shabby attendance, I managed to get on standby for an earlier flight, and despite the fact that people had been able to fly out of Portland for the three days prior, I managed to get on the flight, and arrive in San Francisco an hour before my original flight was scheduled to leave.
Which was great... since when I later checked my flight, it got delayed three and a half hours.
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