Anirudh Koul, via Flickr

Seven hours. That's how long my fellow passengers and I spent waiting on the airport tarmac Sunday as an uncharacteristic winter blast brought SeaTac airport to a grinding halt. My wife and I consider ourselves lucky. Our snowy flight to Detroit actually made it out despite repeated failures of a malfunctioning de-icing truck.

Given the grim forecasts, we came prepared. Armed with enough tech gadgetry to support a small office, we boarded flight 210 with a fully-charged iPhone, two laptops, a digital camera and a video camera. Email flight notification alerts, supportive Facebook messages and constant use of Twitter helped pass the time and deliver critical information.

In fact, Twitter was a pretty fascinating read throughout our airport adventure. It was where we learned all about the the mass flight cancellations at Horizon and Alaska, which helped shape our decision to stay on the plane rather than disembark and face massive delays later in the week. There was also chatter about the problems with the airport's de-icing truck.

After posting our travel issues on Facebook, we got a flood of support from friends.

"Sorry, bud. That blows," wrote one Facebook friend. All of the support made the seven hour delay on the tarmac somewhat tolerable. And it certainly helped pass the time, giving me an outlet when games of Crazy Eights grew tiresome.

By the time the second hour had passed, we had given up hope of catching our connecting flight to Cleveland. That's when I made a futile attempt to reach Northwest Airlines' customer service to find another flight. On hold, the pre-recorded music kept me entertained for a while. But thirty five minutes later I still had not talked to a customer service agent and, 24 hours later, I still had the tunes echoing in my head.

Throughout the day, I continued to get email notifications about the flight status. (More on the airline alert technology from an earlier post.) At one point, the notification indicated that we had "departed." Technically, it was true. We pushed back from the gate about 40 feet, but it  was a short journey. We sat there for an hour at least while the de-icing vehicle attempted to complete the job. But before finishing, it ran out of fluid.

So, back to the gate we went. And that's where we sat some more, until the pilot decided to show his mercy and let us disembark with $10 food vouchers in hand. We had 30 minutes "on land" where many of us used the new-found riches to get some nourishment at Burger King.

With full stomachs and a renewed sense of hope, we returned to the plane ready to make our destination, no matter what.  That was at 1:15 p.m. It would be another three hours and two more de-icing efforts before we would take off.

When we finally got in the air, cheers went up and our headphones went on as we watched a sappy holiday movie that got us through the majority of the flight.

We arrived in Detroit about four hours later, where more delays ensued as crew members scrambled to find a jetway to actually let us off the plane. Once we stumbled off, we had missed our original connecting flight by about six hours and quickly learned via the departure billboard that we had three minutes to catch one last flight to Cleveland. The alternative: a nice piece of floor in the Detroit airport.

With 35 gates between us and our final destination, we grabbed our carry-on luggage and began to run. As we were in the home stretch, passing a work crew, a guy shouted: "Going to Cleveland?"

Answering in the affirmative, the worker radioed gate 77 to alert the lone attendant that we were on our way. With a smile on her face, she printed our boarding passes and walked us down the jetway where she knocked on the locked door to let us in.

Things were starting to go our way. We phoned ahead to family members in Ohio, who sleepily agreed to pick us up at the Cleveland airport at 1:30 a.m. They started driving. We started flying.

It was five degrees when we arrived and the wind was blowing. We caught our ride, and everything looked great until we rolled into our hometown 50 minutes away.

It was then that we noticed something odd. No Christmas lights. No illuminated street lamps. And as we turned the final corner to our home, the garage door didn't open.

The power was out.

[Flickr photo via Anirudh Koul]