Oh Nemo . . .

Snow from storm system Nemo blankets Manhattanites in Times Square.

Two days before we were slated to leave on our Ireland/New York adventure and wouldn't you know it . . . the East Coast gets hit with the first big weather system of the year. Now, traveling during winter you expect certain things: snow, cold, windy, cold, etc. But no one ever wants really bad weather when they're about to go on vacation.

With approximately 48 hours till we were scheduled to take off the earliest news reports were coming in that a storm system was threatening to dump snow on the East Coast from the New York area up into New England. As Friday came and the projected storm did indeed roll in, all we could do was sit, watch, and wait as the snow piled up and flights were postponed or cancelled. Hawaiian even posted delays for their Friday flight to NYC and their Saturday flight from NYC to Honolulu.

Fortunately for us there was a decided silver lining to all this; weather forcasters were predicting that the weather system would be gone by Monday or Tuesday. To me this meant that there was a chance that our flight could make it out and get us to JFK when we needed to be there. A delay would be fine, a whole scale cancellation would have been devastating.

Now, just hours away from departure, we'll have to see what the weather has in store for us on the East Coast.

Satellite imagery of the Nemo storm system.