Our lovely vacation to DC and Charlottesville is being involuntarily extended by 24 hours! When we were getting close to the airport last night, we found out our flights were cancelled. Fortunately, we have good friends in DC (who I'd stayed with Tues-Fri, and who had then come down to Charlottesville with us last minute), so we made the best of it and called them to see if they wanted houseguests. They said yes, so here we are!
It's funny because I can work remotely pretty easily for my job, so this doesn't cost me any vacation or put me further behind at work. My husband's job is the opposite -- he can't really work remotely (though sometimes he does emails and paperwork via Citrix from home), so he has to use a vacation day today. Yet last night I was far more unhappy and stressed about the situation. I felt bad he was using vacation to be sitting around while I have to work, and after a weekend full of so much food, drink, friends and fun, I was just kind of ready to be home, back in a healthy routine.
We ended up going to the airport since we were nearly there anyway and since when we tried to call American there was just a recording saying they were busy, try the call again later, bye. Not even the usual "extended hold time over 2 hours". The line at the airport was only about 75 people but it was barely moving. While in line, I kept trying to get through on the phone. Eventually I got through and got in the line to be on hold with an "estimated wait time" of over 1 hour. But it wasn't awful. The people in line in front of us were pretty young (early 20s?) and fun to talk to, both from India originally so we got to talk a lot about that. Eventually my call got picked up (there were still at least 50 people in front of us in the physical line) and the best the AA rep could do was putting us on separate flights out of separate airports tonight -- ugh. But at least we'll get home. Other friends who were at the reunion from Dallas are stuck here until Tuesday!
So last night, I finally got over my pissiness that we really were stuck, and my friend convinced me we weren't imposing, and then we had an awesome dinner my friend was making anyway -- roasted sweet potato and mushroom tacos, and lots of wine (ugh! I was planning on starting a personal little detox, but that is also delayed 24 hours), and so much laughing. And now I'm working from her couch, getting ready to go for a run on an awesome trail by her house, and if I can wrap things up, we may do a memorial or museum in DC for fun prior to setting out for the airports.
Tonight will be as miserable as last night was supposed to be -- just 24 hours later. We will get home late, have to run to the store since the fridge is totally empty, have no clean laundry, etc. Ugh. But whether it was last night or tonight, a small price to pay for such a fun week.
Not bad in the end!
Funny how that type of thing works - it isn't always correlated to actual impact. Definitely sounds like you can't get out of your own way with this. I can laugh because it is you and not me :) Oh well, glad you had fun - and good luck getting home - travel safe!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad that you made the best of it! I've had the same thing happen to me once, and while it sucked to get home a day later, at least I could stay with a friend & not in the airport. Nice that it worked out for you too.
ReplyDeleteOf course it's easy for those of looking in to say D.C. isn't such a bad place to be stuck for a couple of days and at least you had a place to stay. It's so inconvenient to have to rearrange your plans, stressful to find a place to stay and by the end of a trip I'm just ready to get home. I was so nervous traveling to and from my sister's wedding in Miami at the end of January. There was a snow storm 5 days before which delayed a lot of flights going to Florida. We lucked out thankfully. And then there was a snowstorm predicted for two days after which had flights cancelled before it even began. We were fortunate again to be able to fly out as scheduled, but we landed in the midst of a snowstorm on a very snowy runway.
ReplyDeleteI hope you make it home safely.
the closest i've come to this situation was back in 1999 when all those tornadoes were happening in May and my connecting flight from Dallas to Austin was delayed and we got stuck at the airport. a bunch of people from our flight were renting a car and making the drive. they were able to rebook us or our flight finally came in (i don't remember which) and we got home at about 1:30 am instead of like 8pm. plus we got free dinner, so that was nice
ReplyDeleteThat was definitely back in the good old days. No meal or hotel vouchers anymore if it's weather-related!
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