Travel horror stores, v.2

• Posted on Dan
• in travel
• on July 4, 2008
• 1 Comment.

Well I’m finally here on the East Coast. It seems this is turning into a “Why air travel blows” blog but really, I do still love to travel and I do still love Southwest airlines, it’s just that my last few trips have been awful. I was supposed to leave Oakland around, have a stopover in Kansas City (without changing planes) and then get in to BWI at 11 PM EST. Right, so that didn’t happen.

Left Oakland just fine, thought I was on track to have some good karma – gave my change to a homeless man at the BART station, changed seats on the plane so a family could all sit together, generally being a good person. So we’re getting to Kansas City, and the captain comes on and says there is a thunderstorm, and we’re going to circle for awhile. After some circling, we ended up getting diverted to Omaha, which was about 30 minutes away. At this point, I was just happy to be on my connecting flight, rather than having to change planes, because we all know I totally would have been stuck in the Midwest a lot longer than I would have wanted.

So we end up sitting on the plane on the tarmac in Omaha. Nothing, I think, is worse than being stuck ON the plane. No food besides the snacks, no room to walk around, making awkward “oh isn’t this awful” conversation with the people next to you. Children start crying, parents start getting frazzled, everyone is on their cell phone trying frantically to rearrange their pick-up at the airport. I was trying to do the same, as Missy and Franklin were coming to BWI to pick me up. After TWO HOURS of sitting, we took off again to go back to Kansas City, which needless to say, was quite the bumpy ride and an exciting landing. After all this, we still have to get to Baltimore. After another turbulence-filled flight, we finally touched down in Baltimore at about 2:50 AM. My mom was there to get me, and we got home a little after 4.

Today, it took us 4 hours to make the 3 hour drive to Johnstown. *sigh*

The good news is that I get to take a bath. Hahaha not that I don’t regularly bathe, but our apartment only has a shower. So, I will be enjoying the tub here at the hotel.

Happy Fourth of July!