O'HARE — Everyone's got at least one travel horror story, but Natalie Ingrisano's is hard to beat.
After spending Christmas with her family in suburban LaGrange Park, the music teacher was booked to return home to Seattle on Monday. By the end of the day, she learned, taking the train would get her home faster.
Ingrisano was one of thousands of travelers stranded or turned back from O'Hare after Monday's ice storm, which was blamed for 1,360 flight cancellations at the airport, according to ABC7.
Wednesday morning only made things worse, with an extra two inches of snow tacking on another 310 flight cancellations and causing a United Airlines flight to harmlessly skid off the runway.
Ingrisano got the call around 4 p.m. Monday, she said, informing her that her 8:20 p.m. flight had been canceled. From there, things only got worse.
She was able to re-book a flight to Portland, where she'd be able to catch a bus back to Seattle. When that flight was also canceled, she said, an airline representative told her the next available flight to the West Coast wouldn't be until New Year's Day.
"At that point, I just sat in the hallway of the airport and let myself cry for 10 minutes," Ingrisano wrote in an email to DNAinfo. "I was so tired and so disappointed...and I also knew that it was completely out of my control."
It was during Ingrisano's fruitless, two-hour effort to keep her checked bag from flying to Portland without her that she joked, out loud, that it may be faster to just take the train. A nearby airline worker told her it was "a very smart idea, and if I was willing, I should do it," she said.
She went back to her family's LaGrange Park home, did some research, and she learned it was true: not only would the 2,000-mile Amtrak journey be $40 cheaper than rebooking a flight, but it would get her home about 10 hours sooner than the next available plane would.
Despite missing three days of work and having to wait a week for her checked bag to be sent to her in Seattle, Ingrisano said she was looking forward to making the trip by land. Her train leaves Wednesday afternoon.
"I am sure that the trip will be beautiful, and it will also force me to slow down and just enjoy for two days. I could probably use that at this point," she said. "Plus an adventure, and no more airports. I'm sold!"
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