Monday night I fought traffic and a rainstorm for over an hour to get to Pearson International. I made it in time to check in for my flight to Atlanta where I would pick up my connecting flight to Rio. Yes, as in de Janeiro. A high level global conference and I was to be a guest. All kinds of great interviews, panel discussions, presentations and keynotes awaited, which is great if you like that kind of stuff, and I most certainly do. Yeah, I know, I’m a geek.

 “Not now. You may miss your flight to Rio.”

 She clattered and clacked about on the keyboard looking for a solution and came up empty. It was a harbinger of things to come.

 Optimistic, I pushed on, through the U.S. Customs clearance line, then the security search and finally on to the gate.

 It’s never a good thing when there’s no plane at the jetway an hour before take off.

 We checked with the gate ladies who were certain everything was going to be fine.

 “If they have bad weather down there which is why the plane is late here, you’re going to be fine because your connecting flight is going to be late too!” she offered.

 Well it made sense at the time.

 As it turns out the flight did arrive and we were ushered on board for what looked like a pushback time just a 40 minutes or so later than the original time. Surely, we could make the time up and if our flight was late we’d make it?

 And we could maybe ask for them hold while we navigated the massive Atlanta airport, running from one section to the next? Or they could give us an escort on one of those golf carts with flashing lights?

 No dice. But, not to worry, they said. Your flight will be late too.

 And that was that until we got within 20 minutes of Atlanta and we were put into a stack of planes, endlessly circling as thunderstorms light up the skies off our wing.

 After an hour or more the pilot came on and told us we were third in line to land.

 This was good news. Third in line! Surely we’d have a handle on our Rio flight and if the Gods of scheduling and weather were aligned, somehow on a wing and prayer we’d make it.

 About 15 minutes later he came back and said: “Looks like they have wind shear and they’ve closed the airport. We’re low on fuel so we’re going to have to go to Greenville South Carolina as our alternative to refuel.”

 We land at Greenville 20 minutes later. It’s 10:44 p.m. We left Toronto at 7:30 p.m. We check out smart phones and yes, the Rio flight left an hour late but it left.

 Good news though. The system automatically rebooked our flights for Wednesday night, getting us to Rio Thursday morning, just in time for the closing notes at the conference and to pack up and come home on Friday.

 Our first thought was to get off the plane and call a ticket agent and find another route. But no. Turns out Greenville doesn’t deal with international flights so they weren’t sure we could get off the plane since there were no customs agents there.

 “Er, we pre-cleared US customs in Toronto which makes this a domestic flight,” we explained.

 This went on for an hour, us held prisoner while the door was open beckoning freedom.

 Finally we get off the plane, being told that a bus would take us to Atlanta, which was but a mere three hours away.

 My colleague, the PR lady who was just as eager to get to Rio for her company’s conference, was on her iPhone quickly, wrestling with the phone tree to get a real person to explain our dilemma. Rio not Greenville SC was where we were supposed to be. What would it take to make the original plan happen.

 After an hour of fruitless attempts it turned out there were no available seats through any routing to Rio: Miami, Mexico City, Caracas. Nor to any other Brazlian city like Brasilia or Sao Paulo.

 To put it frankly: we were fucked. Royally fucked.

 At this point, the bus wasn’t going to cut it. There was nothing for us in Atlanta anyway and the prospect of hanging around there until Wednesday night for a fruitless flight didn’t sit well.

 We demanded and got rooms for the night. By the time we got to bed it was 1:30 a.m. and we were up at 7:30 p.m. for the 8:30 shuttle to the airport for the 9:30 am flight to Detroit.

 One last hiccup. Our Detroit to Toronto flight was delayed 30 minutes because they couldn’t find the flight attendant and were madly paging her.

 Such is life in airports. Arriving in Toronto, however, there was a sign that perhaps the curse was being lifted. Our bags were the first off the carousel and my ride home only took 25 minutes.

 Maybe I’m on the road to redemption after all. I have nowhere to go but up from here.