Have you ever had troubles while traveling? Been stuck in an airport or whatnot? Most of my life I've had fairly good luck while traveling. I managed to travel around the entire world on a ship for four months with very few issues in the actual act of getting from place to place. Sometimes one sits back and thinks about how lucky they are in their life, but as far as travel goes I suppose I've taken for granted just how seemingly easy it is to get from one place to another. A good friend of mine just got married in Maine and I thought "great! I'll go to Maine for a few days, attend the wedding and have a great time!" No problem, right? I even decided to bring a date to this wedding, so invited my boyfriend to come along. We booked our flights months in advance and planned as much as anyone does for a five-day trip to Maine. Now children, someday you will learn that all the planning in the world can't save you from bad luck. If you've ever had a bad travel experience, read this and let me know if yours is worse....
It all started just hours before our plane was supposed to leave Denver. I got a call from the US Airways (yes I'll name drop in this blog...the world needs to know) saying that our flight from Denver to Charlotte, NC had been cancelled. Great. We were supposed to fly an overnight flight Denver to Charlotte, then Charlotte to Boston and arrive in Boston in the morning, bus to Portsmouth, NH and then rent a car and drive to our final destination: Wells, ME. A little complicated, but seemed do-able. No, no, no...not so do-able. So with our first flight cancelled, I had to spend three hours on the phone with airlines, airports, friends, and automated recordings. After many frustrating hours on the phone I found out that we could not get another flight to Boston by any possible combination of layover cities until two days later, a Friday. The wedding was on Sunday so we'd still make it but we'd have to cancel our rental car. Sigh. Oh well. So we waited two days, and finally Friday morning came, we woke up bright and early at 5:30am and walked to the Boulder bus station to catch our bus to the Denver airport. We arrived in plenty of time and when we reached the ticket counter it seemed that our plane was delayed to Charlotte, which meant we would miss our next flight to Boston. Of course. So we were re-routed to travel from Denver to Charlotte, Charlotte to New York and New York to Boston. Ridiculous, but oh well. As we got onto our flight to Charlotte they said the overhead compartments were full and we would have to check our carry-ons. This was unfortunate because we didn't have any other checked luggage, only carry-ons and we had to give them up. Lame. We then got to Charlotte, successfully made it on to our flight to Philadelphia but then our plane had to circle over Philly for an hour, causing us to miss our next flight to New York. This meant, of course, that our luggage went to New York without us. We were then booked on to a flight directly to Boston instead of New York then Boston. Great, except that our luggage was on its way to New York. We spend a few hours in the Philly airport, trying not to have a mental breakdown at the bad luck thus far...unaware that it wasn't over yet. We finally got on our plane to Boston and of course, more delays. We finally reached Boston around 2am. The buses to Portsmouth stopped running at 1am so we were thus stuck in Boston for the next four hours until the buses started running again. By this point we were smelly, messy, upset, and hungry. In desperation I called the only person I knew in Boston and by some stroke of unbelievable luck in a sea of bad luck, he answered and said yes he was still awake and yes he'd love to come pick us up and take us somewhere to eat at 3 in the morning. Atanu Roy...you are my savior! Bonus was that I hadn't seen Roy in years, and he was one of my best friends on Semester at Sea so he was a fellow traveler and such a selfless and compassionate friend to pick us up from the airport and take us to a Boston I HOP at 4am so we could eat. He then raised his status even more by taking us back to his apartment and letting us sleep on his couch for a couple hours, then took us back to the airport so we could catch our bus to Portsmouth. We finally got to Wells, Maine three days after we were supposed to with no luggage and 24 hours of airport grime on us. Our luggage finally caught up to us Saturday evening, just in time to shower and change and we were able to wear clean clothes to the wedding the next day!
Our time spent in Maine, while shorter than we hoped, was totally awesome. The wedding was fun, the weather was tolerable (could have been warmer but who cares, we got to see the ocean!!), and the people were as amazing as always. I'll write another blog about that, but this one's not over yet...
If you're still reading this, well, I have no idea why...but thanks! You'd think we'd had all the bad luck we could possibly have, right? We thought so too. We had tickets to fly home via Boston, Dalls, then Denver. Simple! Well simple if you're anyone but us. We got to Boston no problem, got on our plane, no problem, no delays, no problems. We got into Dallas and the weather took an unbelievable turn for the horrific. Our plane had to fly around Texas for over an hour waiting for other planes which had been delayed to get out of our way. By the time we landed, of course, we had missed our flight to Denver. But not only that, there were TORNADOS in the area. Awesome!! We had nothing to do but sit in a TGI Friday's and eat appetizers and drink cocktails for the night. Then we saw people walking around the airport with little army-style cots. We thought uh-oh, we need to get cots before they run out because yes, we had to sleep in the airport. We didn't get a flight out until TWO DAYS later. Everything leaving Dallas was cancelled and we were stuck in the airport with hundreds of other people. We got cots, had a couple more drinks, then unsuccessfully tried to find a hotel nearby with vacancies. No such luck. So we accepted our fate of sleeping in a Texas airport and set up camp in a corner which turned out to be next to the hallway where people with loud rolling luggage walked as they got off their planes that were finally arriving again to Dallas. We moved our sad little beds and paper-thin red airport blankets several times that night and got perhaps 2 hours of sleep between the both of us and were once again miserable. The next day we booked a hotel room for that night, then waited in a 3-hour long line to get our boarding passes printed for our flight the next day home to Denver. We then went to our hotel and slept the rest of the day, as we hadn't gotten sufficient sleep in the loud and obnoxiously bright Dallas airport. By now I'm tired of reliving this nightmare and you're probably tired of reading it so I'll sum up the last day of the catastrophes by saying we stayed in our hotel in Irving, TX that night, then made our flight to Denver very early that morning and finally arrived home to Boulder around noon.
All in all, it was the worst week of traveling I have ever experienced. No doubt. But the time we spent in Maine, like I said, was awesome. I'm thankful to have so many amazing friends who are willing to help out when I'm going through travel hell! Roy, Will, Jess, Ben, Kathy, Tom, Ron, and everyone else who helped us out, thanks so much!!! You don't even know. I wish you all nothing but safe and easy travels for the rest of your lives. And thanks to Anthony for surviving the whole thing with me! Amazing.
More blogs soon to follow!
*Peace and Love*
