The Long Road to the 3M

"How did you find me? I'm in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming,” Wesley Bryan said when he answered my call. Bryan and Ryan Brehm's caddie, Lee Chaney, were a few hours into their nearly 16-hour drive from the Barracuda Championship in Nevada to the 3M Open in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

It all began late Sunday night when Bryan and Chaney's flight from Salt Lake City to Minneapolis was canceled. Airlines are still scrambling to catch up from last week's global technology outage. A quick check of flights for the next day out of Salt Lake City yielded nothing. Flight searches of surrounding airports also came up empty. The best Delta could promise was a flight to Minnesota on Wednesday afternoon or evening. That wouldn't work. 

That is when Chaney and Bryan joined forces and decided to drive across the country. But it wasn’t that simple. Delta informed them they couldn't get their bags until the next morning. 

They booked a Sheraton near the airport and headed to the Avis counter to reserve a rental car. There they encountered another speed bump: Avis wasn't allowing customers to reserve one-way rentals. Bryan told Avis they would return the car to Salt Lake City next Tuesday. With the car now secured, they headed to the hotel around midnight without luggage. 

"They had women's secret deodorant and a toothbrush; what else could you ask for," Bryan told me about the hotel. 

The pair woke up around 5 a.m. and headed back to the airport where they received more bad news: Bryan's luggage was on its way to Minneapolis via UPS (hopefully). Chaney's luggage was still there, so they grabbed it and headed for a Jeep Wrangler Hybrid, their home for 16 hours or so (Bryan and Chaney asked me to shout out to Delta supervisor Nakota Rodriquez, who was amazingly helpful). 

When I spoke to Bryan, he had taken the wheel for the first leg of the trip and had planned to drive as far as he could before Chaney took over. "It's really been a lot of fun, it felt like the mini-tour days." 

The GPS said they would arrive at the Minneapolis Airport at 1 a.m. on Tuesday. "I think that is at 60 miles per hour; we are going about 90 right now," Bryan said. 

I asked Bryan how he planned to return the car to Salt Lake City. "I plan to leave it at the Minneapolis airport and pick up my courtesy car. We will see what type of fees they hit me with. They say that Avis is the preferred rental car of the PGA Tour. We will see what that means." 

‍