It’s Wednesday morning in Cleveland, and boy are you jazzed – you’re leaving the miserable cold and Clevelandness behind and heading to Orlando! Yee-haw!

Only it takes you 12 hours to get there. Because you spend about 10 of those hours – in the AirTran plane – TRAPPED ON THE TARMAC. The plane froze! And they couldn’t de-ice it!

So – how was it, sitting on a frozen plane for hours? Not too good, according to the passengers:

“It was horrible, the worst experience ever.”

“We had no water, no air, they couldn’t turn the engine on.”

“They announced the deicing process is $7 a gallon. I don’t care what it costs.”

“It was quite pleasant really as it finally gave me time to finish up Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’.”

Okay, I made that last one up. But there is a silver lining – they did eventually get to the land of Mickey, and, AirTran is sending all the passengers a written apology, plus, a free roundtrip ticket.

Hey, they were only trapped on the tarmac – it’s not like they landed on the Hudson or anything.

An Australian and a Swede were flying over the Arctic (Northern Canada) when their twin-engine Cessna failed, so they crash landed on a slab of ice.

Only the ice wasn’t real sturdy, and plane and ice began to sink.

They hopped out and managed to jump onto another sheet of ice — measuring all of 16 ft by 32 ft. Fortunately, that one didn’t sink or they would have been in big trouble.

Not that sitting on an ice floe overnight was a walk in the park. Temperatures could best be described as “high-end refrigerator” — you know — Sub-Zero.

Anyway, along comes daylight, and they — get this — hopped from one ice sheet to another, til they finally reached the shore (at Iqaluit, Nunavut). Eventually a passing fishing boat saw them and picked them up.

Tough guys.

Well, it’s not all THAT chaotic, but there is some interesting video of chairs hurtling along a deck of the Pacific Sun (of P&O Cruises).

The rumpus was caused by a really, really bad storm.

How bad was it? 40 passengers were injured (some with broken bones).

How bad was it? The waves were 23-feet high.

How bad was it? One woman texted a “Goodbye-I’m-Going-to-Die” message to her family.

Never would have happened if they followed the code I live by: Avoid boats in storms.

An Arizona State professor has gotten a grant from the Air Force to study turbulence.

Grant is worth $716,000, and Prof. Alex Mahalov will try to save lives with it.

No snide comments on this post. I mean, the life he saves could be my own.

It’s 9-degrees in Chicago as I write this (or, as The Weather Channel puts it oh-so-cheerily, “It feels like -12!”).

So why does a certain travel website suggest freezing New Yorkers should check-out a “Sunny Getaway” to the City-of-Big-Shoulders? (Thanks, Upgrade: Travel Better).

But wait, there’s more: CNN runs a loony AP article on how tourists gush about the glories of Chicago in winter time.

Gush! But wait, it gets better!

Just click “more” and see for yourself.