I was somewhere between Orange County and Union Station on a Metrolink train when I checked my phone and saw it: my Burbank-to-Phoenix flight was delayed. Not terrible—maybe twenty minutes. I’d still make my connection in Phoenix to Chicago.
Except twenty minutes became forty. Then an hour. By the time I transferred to the northbound train heading to Burbank Airport North, Southwest had rebooked me onto a direct flight to Midway.
Most people would’ve been relieved. I was tracking a different kind of loss.
The original routing—Burbank to Phoenix, then Phoenix to Chicago via Louisville—wasn’t the fastest way to get where I was going. I picked it because it worked with my morning: a mid-morning departure meant I could take the train instead of dealing with a car. My 7:30 PM arrival meant my friend could pick me up on their way home from downtown without me inconveniencing anyone. And yes, the routing itself mattered to me. Phoenix to Louisville isn’t a segment I’d flown before, and probably wouldn’t get another chance to fly. It was one of those uncommon opportunities that Southwest’s network sometimes creates.
But now? Direct flight. Practical. Efficient. And completely erasing the one thing that made this trip interesting to me.
When the train pulled into Burbank Airport North that November morning, I could’ve called the airport shuttle. Instead, I walked. The weather was spectacular in that eerie way Southern California mornings sometimes are—a thick fog bank hanging over everything, softening the edges of the San Fernando Valley.
I stopped to photograph these trees along the way—leaves shifting from deep purple to green to yellow in this perfect gradient. Couldn’t not capture that. Called my friend who was picking me up later that evening and told her about the rebooking. She was relieved I’d be on time. I was still processing.
Stopped at McDonald’s for breakfast. Hadn’t had that in a while. Then it was a quick ten-minute walk to the airport.
Security wasn’t bad, but the gate area was chaos. Nearly every inbound Southwest flight was running an hour to ninety minutes late because of the fog. People were camped out everywhere, resigned to the wait. The irony wasn’t lost on me: the flight I’d been rebooked onto—the one I didn’t want—was leaving on time.
Standard flight across the United States, nothing remarkable about it. We landed at Midway. I walked to arrivals and, out of curiosity, looked up what had happened to my original flights.
The first one, Burbank to Phoenix, had finally arrived about forty-five minutes after my Phoenix to Chicago flight departed. I would’ve been stuck in Phoenix. So the rebooking had saved me from a misconnection. Fine. At least there was that.
But then I noticed something strange about that second flight. I pulled up its flight path and watched the route it had actually flown. The plane left Phoenix, heading northeast toward Louisville, as it was supposed to. But somewhere over western Kentucky, the path turned sharply northwest, cutting straight for Chicago. It skipped Louisville entirely.
I opened Google News and found the answer immediately: Louisville’s airport was closed. A UPS cargo flight had crashed just after taking off a few hours prior. The airport was shut down. My flight—the one I would’ve been on if the fog hadn’t delayed me out of Burbank—had been diverted mid-flight.
I stood there at Midway, waiting for my friend, taking in what I was reading. If everything had gone according to plan—if there’d been no fog, no delay, no automatic rebooking—I would’ve been on a plane that turned around mid-flight. I would’ve landed back in Chicago, but hours later, on a flight full of confused and frustrated passengers, after sitting through whatever chaos that diversion created. Or maybe I would’ve been stuck in Phoenix, waiting for a different flight to get me to Chicago.
The fog that ruined my routing had kept me out of something far worse. And I had no idea it was happening until it was over.
I don’t know what to do with that kind of timing. There’s no moral here, no lesson about trusting the universe or whatever. It’s just strange to realize that the thing you spent the morning thinking about, a delay you couldn’t control, a rebooking you didn’t want, turned out to be exactly what you needed. Not because it was more convenient. Because it kept you out of something you didn’t even know was coming.
At the end of the day, I had a flight that got me where I needed to go. That’s all that really matters. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about that fog bank over Burbank, and the flight path that turned northwest over Kentucky, and the strange way those two things connected without me having any say in either one.
I keep thinking about those trees I photographed that morning—the way the leaves shifted from purple to green to yellow without any clear line between the colors. Just a gradient. You couldn’t point to where purple ended, and green began. That’s what that day felt like. I couldn’t tell you the exact moment when a delay became the thing that changed the whole situation. It just… happened. One thing became another thing, and I only understood it in reverse.
Sometimes the reroute is the route.
