My luggage makes it home

 ...more than 24 hours after I did.  Which was a good 16 hours after I was supposed to get home.  Let me recap.  Peter heroically got up at 4:30 AM on Wednesday to get me to the train for a 5:30 departure to St. Pancras (thence to Heathrow via Paddington) and everything went swimmingly: I was at Heathrow before 9:00 for a flight that was supposed to leave at 12:15.  But as I was being helped in checking my bags by a very nice young French person, she asked me if I knew my flight to Chicago was delayed.  It was already scheduled to leave at 1:40 and she let it be known with Gallic gloom that it was likely to be delayed much more than that.  (In the end it was about 2 hours delayed.)  This would mean that I would miss my flight to Flint, but this mattered little, because there are flights from Chicago to Flint practically on the hour.  Well... when I got to Chicago I discovered that all remaining flights to Flint had been canceled for the day because of expected hurricanes (that ended up not happening).  At this point I was almost drunk with fatigue so I asked how near to Flint they could get me.  Lansing, it turned out, on a flight departing at 11:11 PM (and arriving after 1 AM because of the hour's difference between Illinois and Michigan).  So I checked my bag and went to the gate.  I was near-drunkenly pondering how much an Uber from Lansing to Flint would cost in the middle of the night, when the Lansing flight was delayed.  Bugger this, I thought, and found a helpful American Airlines employee and changed my flight to the first one to Flint the next day (8ish AM) and got a complementary stay at a nearby (well, if 15 minutes along the freeway on a shuttle counts as "nearby") Best Western as well as $12 off a meal in the airport (which I used for breakfast the next day - potatoes good, eggs not so much).  And the flight was on time!  And thanks to lovely tiny Bishop airport in Flint (and the fact that I had to go through customs in Chicago (with new creepy facial recognition)) I strolled to the baggage carousel whistling a happy tune.  So, of course, my baggage never showed.  Nobody working for American Airlines at all, in now no-longer "lovely", more like dinky and useless Bishop airport, and with Jami and Frederick revving the car on the curb, I left it for later.  Well, I had to come back TWICE before I got anyone actually working, but when I did it was all sorted and my baggage was not only flown from Lansing to Flint, it was hand delivered by courier to my door.  Phew!