24 August, 2008

oh the humanity

yikes, we had quite an ordeal getting home. anyone watching my tweets from the airport on twitter has an idea, but those of you who aren't on that bus don't know.

anyway, the ordeal started with us getting to the pensacola airport at 2pm (trying to beat the arrival of TS fay) to find out that our 4:30 flight was canceled. northwest, however, rebooked us on an american airlines flight. they got us out of pensacola at 2:55 and sent us to dallas. we were supposed to catch a connecting flight to msp at 7:55 pm. well, we spent our extended layover time in dfw looking for something to eat. some of us wanted good food and some of us wanted pizza hut. we split our meals. anyway, we arrived at our gate, c31 a little early and settled in. about 40 minutes before bording, a storm rolled through. about 20 minutes before bording it was announced that our flight was moved to a different gate, a23. we gathered up our stuff and went to the monorail transporter because the a and c concourses were a ways apart.

heh... the transporter was shut down because of the severe weather, so we hoofed it to the a gate. we made it on time, but there was a huge line at the checkin desk. after a few minutes of standing around, i discovered those people were there because their denver flight was cancelled and they were trying to get reticketed, phew... had nothing to do with us. anyway, right before bording time, we found out there would be a delay.

and delays there were... things truly bounced around for another hour, we needed a new plane, they couldn't find our flight crew, the new plane had brake problems. we wondered if we'd ever get home. finally, we were boarding. when we handed our boarding passes to the gate agent, he said, "oh, you're the tombs, stand over here. he'll (points to the other gate agent) take care of you." the other guy pounded away on the keyboard for a few minutes and said that someone else needed our seats as a family was accompanying a passenger who needed wheelchair assistance and they needed our "row 8" seats.

by this time, i was about to allow them to seat us (we were two adults traveling with two children) in four totally different seats if that would get us home that night. then, mr. keyboard walked over to me and handed us the boarding passes with a smirk and he said, "merry Christmas." as we walked down to the plane we looked at the tickets and we had 3a&b and 4a&b. could it be? yup, we got bumped to first class for this leg. the perfect end to a darned great week.

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