I wondered why they couldn't hook a ride to a different airport and make better connections? It's not like there's no other airports within an hour of NYC.
I thought of another aspect of this: We ALWAYS could have just bought a ticket back home, but didn’t want to spend the money if we could avoid it. It wasn’t that we “couldn’t” do it. If that was the case, there is absolutely NO WAY we would have flown standby unless it was a matter of life and death.
They were stuck in SLC, not NYC.