Live From Denver

This just in! Hello to all of our friends and family. We are still in Denver waiting out the blizzard hoping to be in Oregon by tomorrow night.

It’s so neat to see God’s hand in all of this despite the circumstances. People are starting to clear out a little bit now. There are a few runways open at the airport and flights were supposed to resume today at noon. A few people we had met and talked with left for the airport this morning. It’s kind of hard to see people leaving when you’re still waiting for your own flight!

As Jason mentioned in our previous post, our next flight doesn’t leave until 5:45 tomorrow evening. Even at that we are so thankful because there are many people who don’t even have anything confirmed and they might not get out of here until Christmas day or later. We’re so blessed that our flight should leave as planned tomorrow, just in time to be home for Christmas Eve.

We are also so thankful for our cozy hotel room. Since we don’t have TV at home we have been enjoying watching all the shows we never get to see! (Although today we have had it turned off for awhile; TV overload!) So basically we’re just hanging out in our hotel room, watching TV, reading books, chatting with friends and family on our cell phones, and playing cribbage.

Today there were finally a few stores open and we walked a block to Walmart and got some goodies to tide us over. On our walk we had to go through snow that was up to our knees!

Here are a few stats that I read in the paper today:

  • The closure of the airport was the longest of it’s 12 history (about 45 hours)
  • 5,000 people were stranded at the airport with no available hotels (praise the Lord we made it to a hotel!)
  • The estimated amount of dollars lost for airlines is $15 to $20 million
  • There were approximately 300,000 travelers affected by canceled flights on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. They’re expecting that 100,000 people won’t make it home for Christmas.
  • With just Frontier and United Airlines alone there were 2,659 flights canceled.

So in all that craziness, we are so thankful for our hotel with food available! We might wish we were home but things could be so much worse! So although there is not really any new news since yesterday we just wanted to let you all know that we are still here and we still appreciate your prayers. Pray that we would be able to get home tomorrow night! Merry Christmas to all!!