When Jon MacPhee and his wife booked their flight to New Orleans for the 2025 NADA Show, they were looking forward to what they thought would be a warm getaway from the Canadian winter.

The reality, of course, was just a bit different.

A record-breaking blizzard covered New Orleans with eight inches of snow on Jan. 21 — two days before the auto retail industry’s largest annual event was to begin — paralyzing the unprepared city and shutting down its airport.

For Canadian dealers and vendors determined to attend, that was the beginning of an odyssey filled with delays, cancellations, unexpected detours, last-minute changes and in many cases multiple modes of transportation.

The trip to the Big Easy turned out to be anything but ...

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