Travel Woes Pt. 1

Something always happens when you travel. God must think it’s funny when everything goes wrong, and looking back, it is. As the lead singer of AJR said, “A hundred bad days made a hundred good stories.” Or, to keep it classy, as G.K. Chesterton said, “An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” Our first adventure happened flying back from our honeymoon. Originally, the flights were all settled to have us back at a timely hour, rested, and ready for church the next morning. 

Saturday, 4:00 P.M.

  Our first flight out of Florida was delayed due to some technical malfunction, and we would miss our connecting flight. They assured us the assistants at the gate in Dallas would help us in get a voucher for a hotel and a flight booked for the next morning. Not exactly what we had in mind, but we put a brave face on it. 

Saturday, 8:00 P.M

We flew into Dallas, and stood in line at the customer service desk. We explained what we’d been told, and the lady clacked way on her keyboard, with two-inch long fingernails. She informed us we were going to spend the night in Seattle, not Dallas, and that they were boarding the flight now, and we must run and catch it, and they’d help us get hotel vouchers and a flight out, all at the desk in Seattle. Okay, we thought. But wouldn’t be easier to just stay in Dallas and spend the night? No time, we were told. Run and catch the flight to Seattle. So we ran. Oh that we hadn’t. We made it to the gate just before they were closing up the plane. We took our seats, after some asking around to let the honeymooners sit by each other. 

Saturday 9:00 P.M.

  The plane sat at the gate and it began to rain. A weather delay we were told. 45 mintues or so. 2 hours passed. It was now a full on lightning storm. Although airline policy did not allow them to keep us all on the plane, grounded, for longer than two hours, we couldn’t leave. They had disconected the jetbridge, and the ground crew couldn’t go out on the tarmac and recconect the gateway to the plan because of the lightning. The flight attendants passed out water. We were wishing we’d brought more snacks, and shed as many layers as we could, breathing in the humid Dallas air, recirculated to death.

Sunday, 12:30 A.M. 

  A little after midnight we were told all flights out of Dallas had been grounded. And none would be leaving anytime soon. As it was a weather delay, the airline was not responsible, and would not be covering hotels. Every one of those grounded flights released all their passengers back into the airport, where a couple of airline employees were left to reschedule flights for the hundreds of delayed passengers. We were not near the front of the plane. By the time we made it into the airport, the lines at the desks were hours long. We had no idea where our checked bag was. We had no flight home. We had no hotel voucher. We set off to find a taxi to the nearest Denny’s. 

Sunday, 1:00 A.M.

We shared a taxi with an odd, but friendly, man with a lisp. He told us much about his traveling inconveniences and the kind of hotel he just had to stay in. Certainly not the shabby things the airline would put you up in.  The driver dropped him off at his nicer hotel before leaving us at a Denny’s next to a Red Roof Inn. The driver seemed to have forgotten we were splitting the fare with the other man. In the Denny’s, we ordered some of the best tasting food I can remember (maybe that was the hunger talking) and watched the lightning. At one point, our waiter apologized for the police cars that had come by. They were picking up a lady outside, he said. We were young lovers with eyes only for each other, and had seen nothing. Or maybe we were too slap-happy tired to notice. 

Sunday, 2:00 A.M.

We made our way to the Inn, ($80 a night—what a deal right?) We booked a non-smoking room, and walked through the parking lot to a separate building in the back. Many of the rooms around it had taped up windows, like they’d been vandalized and were now under construction. We went into the room. Didn’t we say non-smoking? Oh well. Too late to bother. We went to bed. 

Sunday, 8:30 A.M. 

Waking up with what must be lung disease, we went back to the Denny’s for breakfast, and to try and find a flight home. We eventually found one out of a different Dallas airport, in the late afternoon. 

Sunday, 5:00 P.M.

  The flight home was mostly uneventful. We made a friend on one of the flights. She was quite chatty. She had reached the drink limit, informing the stewardess to top her off when the hour had passed and she was allowed another. She asked if we wanted kids and to travel before we had them and all the advice she felt in her power to give in the wisdom of her years. She had been a girl when Mount St. Helen’s erupted, and told us she was at her grandmother’s trying to smoke the stubs of left-over cigarettes. She told us about her kids, and the details of her sons’ birth-control choices. A couple of kids apiece, and then they got “fixed,” as she put it.  

Monday, 1:30 A.M. 

We made it home at last. We’ve decided to never stay at a Red Roof Inn, no matter how cheap it is. This was but the first of our traveling adventures, and took up more space than I thought. I shall have to leave our California road-trip (including morning sickness, broken tailpipes, and old rose petals in a hotel room jacuzzi) for another time.