My weekly column distributes on Tuesday, Sept. 5, but there wasn’t room to tell how my poker tournament partner Scott Reed and I finally got home to Illinois from Las Vegas after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Here’s the rest of the story:
After finishing sixth in the stud tournament the night of 9/11 at the Four Queens Poker Classic, I went back to our hotel room and we watched the sad news on TV for quite a while. We considered our options for getting home. Nothing sounded very good.
Our return flight was scheduled for Saturday the 15th, but we would have flown home sooner than that if possible. Problem was, the planes were grounded and we had no idea when they might fly again.
We checked on rental cars but the story was always the same: “We don’t have any” or “This one-way rental will cost you an arm and a leg.” Well, they didn’t exactly say that, but some rentals were going for $1,000 a day or more. Heck, there were lots of tourists who just bought a car to drive home in.
We decided to take it a day at a time, hoping that the flight ban would be lifted. We weren’t afraid to fly because we figured that airplanes would be safer than ever in the early days after the attack.
Wednesday and Thursday passed, but nothing changed. We played some poker those days, but didn’t do much else. I remember just missing the money (12th of 59 players I think) in a $500 stud event that Thursday, thanks to a bad beat I suffered at the hands of Jason Virayayuthacorn, who went on to finish second.
By Friday, Scotty had run out of meds, so we went to the VA Hospital to get his prescriptions refilled. The lobby was full of old vets and a few wives who were there doing the same thing or just gathered there in the lobby watching TV and talking about the act of war against our nation three days earlier.
It took four hours to get the meds. I spent much of that time wandering around outside, smoking cigarettes. I saw maybe three passenger airplanes overhead the whole afternoon. The sky, on a normal day, should have been full of them.
We realized that the odds of our flight actually leaving the next day were pretty slim. We were desparate to get home by this point: Scotty was worn out (Vegas does that to you) and I very much needed to get back to work at The Dispatch to direct the staff during the biggest story of our newspaper lives.
Somehow, we found a rental agency (Enterprise I think) that “only” wanted about $500 for a car to drive to Illinois and drop off. “We’ll take it,” we said. That afternoon I walked all over the downtown looking for some U.S. flags to put on the car for the ride home. Everyone was sold out!
Then I found a shop that had a couple of bandannas with a flag design on them. I taped one on the inside of each rear window and we were good to go.
Still dog-tired, we got on the road about noon Saturday and headed toward Colorado. About 9:30 p.m., we could barely stay awake and knew we needed to find a motel. The exit at Grand Junction, Colo., looked promising with a bunch of motel signs.
We learned that EVERY ROOM was taken in the area. The next nearest motel was another two hours down the road, and there were no guarantees they’d have a room, either. Everyone who’d been “stuck” someplace was on the road that weekend, headed home I imagine.
At the last motel we tried, the desk people were extremely nice but said there was nothing they could do. By now it was nearly midnight. We were just about to go sack out in the car when another motel staffer came up behind us, saw Scotty on his crutches, and apparently took pity on us.
She walked behind the counter and told us the wonderful news: “This is you guys’ lucky night. We’ve been saving one room back in reserve, and we’ve decided it’s yours!” she said.
Hooray! The room was just off the lobby, so we didn’t even have to walk very far. Even better. It was a non-smoking room, but they decided not to charge us the standard extra $50 for smoking in it. Perfect!
The next morning I discovered why the rental car was so cheap. The right front tire was damned near bald! We were about to drive through the Rockies and here’s this tread-less thing staring me in the face.
Since it was Sunday, we couldn’t find anyplace open that would sell us a tire. Calls to the rental agency weren’t solving anything. Scotty wanted to hit the road anyhow, but I refused. Finally, we drove to the airport there and convinced the rental-car employee to switch out our “beater” for a different vehicle — preferably one that wouldn’t send us hurtling down a 1,000-foot cliff.
We wound up in a new Buick Regal. Sweet ride! The trip home was truly memorable from that point on. We saw flags and patriotic signs everywhere — on cars, businesses, houses, marquees. The most-popular message written everywhere was “God Bless America.” Cars bearing flags passing each other would honk in solidarity. In those early days after 9/11, this nation really was the UNITED States.
We drove straight through to the Quad-Cities (Nebraska doesn’t look too boring at night!) and I got to work Monday evening.
Footnote: On the next trip we took, the Q-C experienced a really bad flood while we were gone, prompting the staff to rib me pretty hard about “causing trouble” every time I leave town and making me consider switching entirely to online poker at home!
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