Getting Used to Midwest Winters

When they have winters in Missouri, they don't mess about. I've recently moved to St Louis, to marry my American spouse, and trust me, the winters I'm used to are pretty mild in comparison. Our newspapers are usually panicking as soon as we get a few flakes of snow. Half an inch of snowfall is considered a 'blizzard'. Ourt trains become irregular in autumn (whoops, sorry, the Fall) due to leaves on the track, let alone run problem-free in winter.

I've been here before in the winter, but it's been a few years, so I blithely arrived in O'Hare airport on the 1st Dec, to find out my flight had been canceled. Freezing rain was battering the runways outside, and not an awful lot was getting off the ground. Eventually they found me a later flight, and we boarded. We then got off again, because it was too cold to take off. An hour later, we boarded again, and sat on the plane for over another hour while the de-icing vehicles were deployed to coat the plane with whatever it is they coat planes with in cold weather. Half an hour of coating later, it was realized whatever was being sprayed was having no effect. They determined this was due to something with the truck doing the de-icing, and another truck was called for. We eventually got into St Louis about four hours late, and I considered myself lucky to get there at all. Don't ask why my two suitcases took a further forty eight hours to arrive, mind.