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Humor The Joys of Holiday Travel - 2008
| The Joys of Holiday Travel - 2008 |
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The Players: Jan – My bride of 30+ years Chad – Our son - age 28 The Pooch – Shelby the family Golden Retriever Extended Family – Names withheld to protect the innocent A couple of days prior to our scheduled departure, Jan, the pooch and I took a drive down to our brand spanking new airport in Indy to survey the new route down and the traffic patterns (like where in the blazes is the parking lot) etc. Now our press has been in a totally frizz since the place opened a couple of months ago about how the place is an artist rendition of what a ultra modern airport should be. My glancing impression of the "drive by" was that the complex was huge and very under-utilized with tons of open space in the complex. Maybe that's the game plan for future expansion. I also observed that the new location is about 1/2 way to St. Louis and adds about 20 minutes of drive time from the "old" location. Departure: OK, the big departure day arrives. Armed with the additional drive time, I leave for the airport 3 hours before our scheduled departure. Hey, given the fact that it's Christmas, there may crowds at the airport (even gargantuan new airport). We arrive at our parking lot (economy because I'm inherently cheap). The place is about 4x the size of the old cheapo lot. We drive around and in less than 15 minutes find a parking spot. OK, off to the shelter to await the bus to take us to the terminal. A couple of other travelers are already at the shelter (#13). After about 3-4 minutes a bus pulls up to the shelter. The driver opens the door and announces that he's full up (blasted travelers from shelter #1-#12) and another bus would be along momentarily. OK, momentary delay equals around 10 minutes in the now-dropping temperatures. The next bus approaches the shelter. The driver slows down waves and proceeds to keep going. Not even a stop over on this one. I'm tempted to also wave back with one significant finger, but hey it's Christmas right.... Bus #3 pulls up. Now bus #3 is already jammed. It's also about one-third the size of bus #1 and Bus #2. The driver does stop and allows us to join the mob on the bus. By some miracle our luggage and the other passengers do squeeze into the bus. We proceed to terminal gigantic with all due haste. No incidences on the bus other than a "senior" lady gets into a rather vulgar shouting match with another passenger over his mistake of picking up senior lady's bag mistakenly. Merry Christmas to all... We arrive at the Airline X entrance. We are greeted by passengers (like in lots of passengers) in queue in two different lines. I think to myself what the hay is going on around here. Now we've flown Airline X quite a few times before (we're card carrying frequent fliers). So, the experienced Airline X Traveler that I am, I station Jan on the side and mosey on over to the self serve kiosk to do our check in etc. I'm greeted with a sign on the kiosk directing all passengers to use the counter lines (as in the two long lines already well populated) to do all flight-related transactions. I quickly do a mental assessment of the situation and decide that Line #1 is the line to be in (like line #2 hasn't moved since we arrived). So naturally, because I selected Line #1, Line #2 starts to slowly move and Line #1 goes into stall mode. We sacrifice another 10 minutes or so to Line #1 and then jump ship to Line #2. Well, after about 1.5 hours in Line #2 we finally make it to the agent, spend all of 2 minutes to get our boarding passes, check the luggage and make the mad scramble to security. We've now got less than 15 minutes before departure of our flight. Luckily TSA was in better shape that the ticketing people at Airline X. We make it to our gate as the plane is in the final stages of boarding. After the plane leaves the jet way, we spend another couple of minutes on the tarmac while we're de-iced. I don't think it was cold enough for freezing yet but it was mainly a pre-caution. I am a bit concerned because there is a rather significant "ice event" forecasted to start late afternoon in Indy and Chad's flight is schedule to leave around 5:00 pm. Just before I have to turn off the cell for the flight to Tampa, I got a call from Chad. He informs me that he's stuck in traffic on the freeway to the airport due to accidents caused by the sudden icing conditions. I told him I'd try to contact him when we landed in TPA and wished him luck. Our flight down was uneventful. As we de-planed I got a voice mail from Chad telling me he's still on the freeway stuck in traffic (this was like 2 hours since we last talked). I called him and he tells me the entire freeway system has turned into one gigantic skating rink. Ambulances and wrecks all of the place and he hasn't moved in the last 2 1/2 hours. He's now coming up on an 1.5 hours before his departure and he still has 40 minutes drive time to the airport under ideal situations. We talk a bit and he tells me he's going on line on his wireless laptop to see what he can arrange as far as re-booking his outbound flight. He called me back about an hour later and told me he's heading for the airport to see if he can stay the night at one of the airport hotels. He's on a mid day flight out the next day. When we picked him up the next day in Tampa, he informed me that he finally made it to the airport at 9:15 pm. So his fun filled escapade on the freeway lasted about 7 hours. OK, we do the family Christmas experience and have a great time visiting with the extended family in Tampa. Made the trials experienced so far in our travels of minor consequence. Return: On the day we all departed back to Indy, Chad had an earlier flight out with NorthWurst. His scheduled departure was around 1:00 pm. We decided to drop him off directly from our motel after we checked out. That'd put him at the airport a bit shy of 3 hours before his departure. He had his laptop and was planning on doing some work-work in the time before his departure. Jan and I went back to do some last minute visiting and additional holiday eating before our 5:00 pm scheduled departure. From lessons learned in Indy on the way down, I decided to get to the airport about 2.5 hours before departure. Should allow enough time to drop the rental car off and checkin etc. Now given the fact that Tampa International is not a new airport, they've actually got their act together with respect to moving passengers through the whole departure sequence (unlike Indy who probably opened 2-3 months too soon). At any rate, we checkin, go through security and are at our gate in about 20 minutes. So with the dwell time at hand, we kick back and do a little reading etc. waiting for our departure. About an hour into our wait the Airline Guy gets on the PA to announce that there is a radar event going on with Atlanta (evidently the super-duper regional radar gizmo for the FAA). At any rate, flights out of and into Atlanta are severely limited due to the malfunction. He starts making announcements about some inbound and outbound flights to Atlanta. I'm not concerned as we're flying to Indy... right...? About 20 minutes before our scheduled departure, they take our flight announcement off of the little counter board (where they post the flight number and departure time). They move it to another gate but there is no departure time posted. Jan noticed this first. I re-assure her that it's probably because the gate people are busy handling all the poor souls who have to fly into and out of Atlanta. To re-assure her, I suggest that she go check the compute display of inbound and outbound flights for TPA. Sure enough our flight status shows "On Time" with a scheduled departure of 5:39. The only concern that I have at this point is that there is no plane at the gate we are supposed to be departing from. A very small light goes on in the back of my head noting this tiny detail. About 2 minutes after Jan returns the "Gate Guy" gets on his PA again and announces that basically, all flights in the region (as in the southeast U.S.) are messed up due to Atlanta (thank you Ted Turner). He goes on to suggest that passengers disregard the computer status boards as they are lying to the travelers. He then starts announcing the "re-scheduled" flights. I'm getting a little bit concerned at this point as travelers are being re-scheduled 5, 6, 7 hours out from their scheduled departure. Finally, he comes to Indy and announces that we have an additional wait of 2 more hours before departure. For the next two hours we wait and monitor the worsening departures of some of the other flights. No change on the Indy flight. Our re-scheduled departure time comes and we are actually boarding the plane. Everyone is really in a mood to get this bird air borne and we totally load up in like, 12 minutes. Pull away from the gate and I'm starting to feel a bit better. Get in line for takeoff. We keep moving for a couple of minutes and then come to a stop. We're standing still for like 5-10 minutes. I'm doing all kinds of mantra things to insure that we get off the ground before they totally close Atlanta Control Center. Finally, we're taking off.... hallelujah! Now as we are boarding, I casually notice that a grandpa and grandma type are traveling with 2 small tikes (estimated ages 2-3 years old each). Grandpa and the little girl ease in on the other side of the aisle behind us. Grandma and the little boy plop down right behind us. The little boy is "Chatty Burt" and is non-stop yaking. No problem as part of our extended family visit was with great nephew's (ages 5, 4, 3 and 1.5). So we're pretty well hardened for the early childhood noises. The airline makes a heroic effort to compensate us for the slight inconvenience of the delay we endured. On this flight only, we are rewarded with not one, but two bags of barely digestible pretzels each. We also get a full can of soda versus the 1.5 ounce plastic cup of soda you get on most flights. Hey. being a frequent flier has it's rewards and perks! I settle in to a little reading and listening to my mp3 player (sound track from Gladiator). Jan tries to nap as Chatty Burt has gone silent (for the moment). About an hour into our flight, chatty Burt erupts into a real frizzy fit. He's yelping about wanting his “mama”. Above the din I hear Grandma trying to calm him (basically ineffective). I just crank up the volume on Gladiator and I can tolerate the temper tantrum. Jan's got the patience of a saint as she's pretty composed over all of this. The tirade goes on for about 10-15 minutes. Suddenly my nose is assaulted by a strong, unpleasant smell I haven't experienced since our early child rearing days. Baby poop! Jan and I both look at each other and make a simultaneous reach for our personal air flow vents mounted above. Full open and pointed toward the little gremlin. Now Grandma either has a totally defective smeller, can't/won't repair the damage or is sadistic beyond belief as the smell permeates the area for the remainder of the flight... thank you very much Grandma. Closing: The rest of the flight is uneventful and lacking any irregularities. We finally arrive home at around 11:30. After pouring myself a stiff brandy, our travel ordeals start to soften a bit. From the horror stories reported by the mass media, we had it pretty good by comparison. Who knows, maybe in a year, this whole set of “experiences” will be forgotten and we'll be ready and willing to again challenge fate by traveling during the holidays. Merry Christmas All! -Tim Post Note : On Chad's returning flight, they encountered “fog” over Indy. After doing the circling routine for an hour, they were diverted to “Detroit”. He ended up spending the night at a Day's Inn near the airport. He arrived back in Indy the following day at 08:00!
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