Pages

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Travel Agony to Atlanta

Amazon.com order update: My Amazon.com order was outside my door this morning. So weird.

Getting to ATL: The morning started off with good luck: I probably got the last parking spot at the Metro station and I didn't have to wait around a lot for my train to get me to the airport.  The drama started when I was waiting around for my flight.

I noticed that at the 30 minutes prior to departure, no announcements were being made about boarding.  Then I saw the delayed notification on the jumbo screens.  Ok, no problem.  Candy Crush and Twitter kept me occupied, no biggie.  When the delayed time came along, we still weren't boarding.  I was sitting around people that were going to Ft. Myer, Florida.

"Folks going to Ft. Myer, your flight is now leaving at 6 PM."  They had been waiting since 9 or 9:30.  Yikes, that stinks.  Wouldn't want to be them, I thought.

"Folks going to Atlanta, your flight has been cancelled." WHAT?!!!

I texted my boss to let her know to not wait for me.  She was flying in from Denver and we were going to meet in the Atlanta airport and drive over to the hotel together.  Ok, now my dilemma was to figure out if I was going to stand in line at the gate's customer service counter or go back to the counter outside of security.  I chose the latter since the former was getting very long.  So instead of flying out at 12:40, I was able to get booked on a 4:24 PM flight.

Oh, the adventure didn't stop there.

4:24 PM rolls around.  No boarding announcement.  Jumbo screen says "Delayed, 5:10 PM."  Ok, fine.  We board, and...proceeded to sit on the plane for a very long time.  There are some people are the front of the plane milling around.  What's going on?  Why aren't we leaving?  The customer service guy comes over.  Uh oh.   He tells the lady on the other side of the aisle that she has to leave the plane.  Apparently, he was premature in giving standby people seats.  One of the "real" passengers checked in and so she got a seat and bumped off the lady that was already sitting down.  Ugh, that totally sucks.  Finally, at 5:45 PM, we leave (I left the house at 9:30 AM...)

I finally got to Atlanta around 7:30 PM and made a bee-line for Chik-fil-a.  Ah, much better.  The taxi ride smooth (but really rainy) and my hotel room was nice.  I was even able to watch part of NCIS and NCIS:LA.

At least I got to my destination in one piece and I can go to my meeting tomorrow.

Whew.

0 comments :

Post a Comment