Nobody wants to hear Road Warrior stories. Those are the stories business travelers amass over the years about trips in which various things go wrong - delayed or canceled flights, lost luggage, mixed up hotel reservations, etc.

I acquired just such a story trying to get back home to the Chicago area from the AHR Expo in Las Vegas a few weeks ago. I was going to stay mum about it, but since my colleagues at The NEWS noticed I wasn’t in my office for several days after the expo, they started to ask…so I told them my RW story. And now…in the interest of filling a required blog….I inflict it on the world via the Internet.

The expo ended on a Wednesday afternoon and in my “best interest ofThe NEWS”' efforts to avoid an extra night of hotel room charges I decided do a Red Eye flight out of Vegas late Wednesday night (actually just after midnight) that would have gotten me non-stop into Chicago O’Hare around 6 a.m. Thursday. But while I was in Las Vegas at the expo, the Chicago area got hit with 20 inches of snow. My flight was cancelled. I finally got rebooked to fly out of Vegas on Friday morning - about 36 hours later than originally planned.

So I got to spend an extra day and a half in Vegas. But since I don’t gamble and don’t care for the glitz of Vegas, I basically camped out in my hotel room typing away on my computer, writing stories about the expo for The NEWS.

But, wait, there’s more. (Isn’t there always more with RW stories?) The routing from Vegas to Chicago on Friday included a connection through Dallas…on Super Bowl weekend down there…after a 5 inch snow and ice storm down there. It was slow going. And, therein, was the final insult: Here I was, a Bears fan, sitting in the Dallas airport on Super Bowl weekend waiting for the connecting flight to Chicago while scores of dreaded Packer fans kept coming off planes on their way to parties for THEIR team.