I HAVE TO ADMIT that it seemed like a good idea at first. I had never had the opportunity to go home for Thanksgiving before, and when my parents offered to pay for the trip, I immediately accepted.

I had not had any experience travelling over the Thanksgiving holiday, so when I made my reservation for a night flight on Wednesday, I took the travel agent's snickering as a sign of goodwill.

Thus, it was with complete innocence and naivete' that I stumbled into the chaos of the holiday travel nightmare.

The first indication that I had entered a dangerous game came on Wednesday afternoon. My grandmother had offered to give me a ride to Logan, and as we were driving along the lazy curves of Storrow Drive, something large and yellow flashed by us, nearly knocking us off the road in its roaring wake. When I dared to get out of the fetal position and opened my eyes, I realized the object was an old school bus. The next thing I realized was that our spedometer was lounging somewhere between 15 and 20.

"Stomp it, Gramma!" I cried, just in time for another volley of four-wheeled bullets to whisk by us.

"The speed limit is only 30 here," she began to explain, but was cut off by the deafening boom of a truck horn, which seemed to be located somewhere in our back seat. The fact that we could see nothing but an immense grille in our rear window persuaded my grandmother that speeding was synonymous with surviving, and she put the pedal to the metal.

There were relatively few terrifying traffic incidents after that, and by the time we arrived at the New York Air terminal, I had almost stopped shaking.

FROM THE MOMENT I walked up to the counter, I had a deceptively long streak of good luck. I managed to snag a seat on an earlier flight, and when I walked through security, I did not have my usual experience of tripping the metal detector ten times straight and drawing a crowd of police before someone decided the machine was broken. As if this wasn't good enough, the holiday rush only delayed my flight 30 minutes, and I had a window seat a good six rows away from the smoking section.

In fact, the only problem I had on the flight to LaGuardia was the girl sitting next to me, a short hairy creature with the most annoying laugh I have ever heard in my life, a dry croaking hiccup which made it sound as if she were trying to cough up a large and unwieldy insect. Unfortunately, she found her shorter, hairier traveling companion a source of boundless levity, and by the time we landed it was all I could do to keep from plunging my plastic cheese knife into her leg.

I guess things really started going wrong at LaGuardia. As soon as I had fought my way off of the plane, I asked my "customer service agent" for directions to the Piedmont terminal for my connection to Roanoke. Fifteen minutes later, standing in front of the female employee's bathroom, I decided I should try to find it on my own.

Whatever relief I felt at emerging from the enormous, unpleasant mass of humanity which clogged the airport and finding the right gate was lost when I saw what was going on. The travel agent's snickering thundered in my ears as I took my place in the longest line I had seen since "Porky's" opened in Roanoke.

I had been waiting perhaps twenty minutes before it was my turn to get a seating assignment. The man at the counter was just about to give me my little sticker when someone began beating the gate door with all his might.

My agent abandoned me and ran over to see what was wrong. Apparently, the man had secured a seat and a boarding pass for the recently departed Norfolk flight, and then totally missed the boarding call.

"Ain't nobody gettin' on no plane til I'm goin' to Norfolk!" He yelled, slamming his fist against the door.

"I'm sorry, but the plane's already in the air. Could you please move--"