Nightmare Journey

I was dropped off at the airport around 2:20 PM yesterday by my Stepfather. Considering that I checked US Airways.com ahead of time to see that my 3:25 PM flight was already pushed back 20 minutes I thought I was going to make it to the gate without a problem. Anymore most airports have self service kiosks making the process extremely painless. Unless of course your name cannot be found in that little machine and you are instructed to see a representative.

Yep, I wasn't able to get my e-ticket and had to resort to figuring out how to "see a representative" without getting in a huge line that wasn't moving very quickly at all. I checked the board and saw that my flight was delayed until 4:24 PM now, so I guess I could have waited in the line for my turn, But that's no fun. I played dumb and approached one of the self service kiosk luggage handlers and said the machine was saying weird stuff and I didn't know what to do. After a five minute period of silence while he typed furiously on his little keyboard and I stared at the massive amount of people cramming into this lobby the agent very deadpan says "your flight was cancelled." Huh? Cancelled?

So what's the plan now, I ask. The agent informs me that the next flight is 8:30 PM at gate F13 and that I will need to check in at the gate to obtain a seat. Great, it's 3 PM and I'm sitting in the airport waiting for an 8:30 PM flight, sounds exciting. Between the hours of 3:30 and 6:30 I occupied myself just fine with my laptop until the juice ran out. I wandered around looking for an outlet to plug into and crawled up under a pay phone with my luggage to suck up some power. All this time there was no gate agent, so I couldn't check in and obtain my seat which made me uneasy. Oddly enough at around 6:50 PM an old roommate of mine from college, Charlene, began walking down the corridor straight at me backpack in tow. I thought for a moment this waiting period had made me delirious and I was imagining her presence, that was until she grabbed me and gave me a big hug. Charlene was returning from Ethiopia by way of Montreal by way of Frankfurt and was more worn out that I was due to her travels, and so we spent a good 15 minutes small talking and comparing battle scars related to our travels with airlines.

After this little surprise run in, I went back to the gate with just enough power on the lap top to make it through a viewing of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which I had packed for the return flight. I finally saw an agent at my gate and proceeded to check in for my seat assignment. It's now 7:20 PM and the flight is supposed to board at 8 PM, so I figured I should get cracking on making sure I have my boarding pass. It was at this point that I'm told I am on standby, a tidbit the initial agent left out. Yikes. You mean there is an opportunity that I will miss making this flight too? Holy shit.

The next 40 minutes were spent panic stricken, waiting for the boarding call to go out and to see how many people show up for the flight, Considering that my flight was cancelled earlier in the day, I was expecting a problem with seats i.e. not enough to go around. After about 14 people make their way on board, the gate agent calls my name and gives me a ticket. I guess she was just torturing me after all. The plane was less than half full, and so I made my way on safely at about 8:05 PM eager to finally get out of the airport and up in the air. I was so excited that I texted my brother Dan to let him know that I was officially on a plane. Yeah!!!

While waiting for the luggage to be loaded on the plane, the pilot chit chats with the gate agent and eventually makes an announcement that the luggage cart next to our plane doesn't appear to be our cart of luggage. So now we are waiting for the right luggage to be located and swapped. And if you are familiar with Philadelphia International you know that the workers there work at a pace somewhere between a sloth and a snail at all times. Once this problem is rectified we push off from the gate at roughly 9 PM heading towards are runway. As expected the snafu with luggage put us 7th on the take off list and we wouldn't be getting airborne until about 9:20 PM the captain tells us. What blows about this situation is that we are not able to listen to Ipods/watch DVDs until we are airborne and the delay is forcing me to keep my lap top on but sleeping. At this point I was just about out of my mind from not eating and just sitting prone for hours on end. I wanted to disappear in the Eternal Sunshine!

I think it was shortly before this estimated time of 9:20 PM that the captain informed us that the runway we were scheduled to use for take off was being closed by air traffic control due to weather. This means we are now in a situation where they have to reroute our flight from another take off location and put us back in line. The captain's estimate was about another 20 minute delay, but he renigged on that information about 10 minutes later when he said the following "um, air traffic control has informed us that there between 20-25 planes ahead of us for take off and as a result we are going to turn off the engines to conserve fuel. At this time feel free to break out your cell phones if you want, however I don't have a good estimate of when we will actually get airborne this evening."

Oh my God. It's 10 PM and I've now officially been waiting to leave Philly for 8 full hours. That's a work day. And I'm still not gone. So I decided to bury myself in Eternal Sunshine and not worry anymore, however the juice I gave my computer turned out to leave me in a position to not see the final 20 minutes of the movie. Dead battery. And we are still on the ground. I think at this point I decided that I was not making it to work today. Considering it's close to 11 PM and that the flight is 90 minutes long and then I have about an hour and fifteen minute drive home from the airport, there is no way I'm making it up at 6:45 AM for work.

Eventually we get up in the air about 11:15 PM and push it back to Columbia, arriving at about 12:40 AM. Wow. 10 plus hours via airplane, and now I have to drive home hungry as hell and tired as can be. I toyed with the idea of getting a hotel room in Columbia, but I couldn't find one. The airport location is oddly tucked away from civilization and nothing was open in the airport to direct me to the nearest hotel, so I said fuck it and made the drive home. A quick stop at Dunkin Donuts was the only further delay on this incredible journey. I got home at 2 AM, and it was at this point that I realized had I just driven back I would have been home 1 hour earlier.

I guess the moral of this story for me is that US Airways is a terrible airline. Down here they refer to them as US Scareways, and I think I finally figured out why. My flight up to Philly didn't take off until after I was supposed to land and the trouble with the return trip detailed above is enough to scare me off from booking another trip on them again. I guess they get points for getting me home safely though? And I am home. And I will be all day long.