I'm blogging from California today to tell you how awful yesterday was. I mean, AWFUL. I will never, ever book a flight with a domestic layover. (I don't know if I've mentioned it on the blog, but I can't remember ever having a domestic layover before. I live near one of the largest airports in this country, and near a second that can get you pretty much any-damn-where you wanna go without a layover, so what we usually do is book non-stop flights. I've had international layovers before, in Milan and France and London, and that's fine. That's slightly different, I think.) We flew one of the major carriers, on S's dad's frequent flier miles. I'm not sure if that's why the flight was booked the way it was, but it had us flying to another city and then on to the CA airport, even though direct flights leave from O'Hare to the CA airport. Regardless, we got the airport on time, the little tv's told us our plane was on time, and it was 11 in the morning. About twenty minutes after arriving, our plane got delayed, which threw, of course, our connection off. There was no chance of making our connecting flight; S called the AA hotline immediately to figure this out.
About ten minutes into his phone call, the delayed flight to that other Midwestern city was cancelled. It was lucky that S was on the phone with AA at the time, because after the flight was cancelled, there was a whole lot of people trying to get a new flight home. Anyway, the solution for the missed connection was to take a non-stop flight out of O'Hare at five. It was almost one when this solution was proferred. Now, four hours is a lot in an airport, but it's really not enough time to get out of the airport, in the car, and go home. We'd have gotten home and had to turn right back around. So we sat at O'Hare (with our apartment a tantalizingly short trip away--just not short enough) and sat and sat and sat and sat and sat and sat and sat. Oh, how we sat.
Finally, we did get on the plane and flew our little butts out here to CA. I've never been so relieved to be in CA, and I probably never will be again. I'm pretty sure the landing was so horrible for me because I could feel my soul being sucked out of my body. Man, I hate California. Anyway, we did what people do, and went to collect our checked bags. I'm pretty sure you can guess where this is going. That's right, no bags! Even though the AA people at O'Hare had four hours to find our bags (which never got to St. Louis, since the plane never went there.) and get them on our direct flight. (For reference sake, we arrived on the west coast at 7:30, two hours after our 5:30 arrival time of before. And, eleven and a half hours after we had left our apartment.) The luggage lady says that our luggage went to Dallas (why? Possibly because one of the options for us was to catch a flight to Dallas and then catch a flight here, but that only got us to CA a half hour earlier than the 7:30 arrival time.) and is on the Dallas-CA flight arriving at 9:30. They can deliver our luggage at two o'clock in the morning. Which, if you're keeping up, is 4 o'clock in the morning central time.
No way, man. No way. No one wants to stay up until two o'clock in the morning waiting for luggage. So we stick around the airport (and grab some In 'N Out Burger, which makes EVERYTHING ok) and wait. Thankfully, our luggage arrived and we got to come to S's parents house. 14 hours after we left our home, we arrived at another home. And I cannot say how cranky I was. Too cranky to even think about. It was a terrible day.
No more one-stop flights EVER. Unless I'm going to Rome.
Comments