I have never slept overnight in an airport before. I also haven’t ever stayed up 40 hours with a couple of small 15 minute naps before. That seems to be what happens when you get snowed in on the east coast. I thought they knew what snow was and what to do with it, but apparently I was mistaken.
Friday Dec 18, the movers took all of my worldly possessions and put them on a truck bound for California. Little did I know, I would not be right behind. My plane ticket was canceled due to snow. I struggled to the airport on the metro with way too much luggage and no clue what I was doing. I managed to get my ticket changed to Sunday the 20th, thinking that would be just fine. I grabbed a hotel room and all was well with the world.
Sunday came, and I went to the airport to stand in line for 3 hours to check my baggage and discover that my laptop was still in the hotel. After calling the hotel to let them know that I needed it shipped I started sitting around the airport. And sitting. And sitting. 3pm came and went for my plane, and we finally boarded around 4pm. We proceeded to sit on the runway for 2 hours to find out Philadelphia was not accepting incoming flights, so we went back to the gate and grabbed food. By then I had already missed my connecting flight, but US Airways (who I will never fly with again) had 1 employee and about 500 customers at the desk. There was no rescheduling.
About 9:45pm we got off of the ground, and 25 minutes later to Philadelphia. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, all of that for 25 minutes of flying. In hindsight I should have attempted driving, snow or not. When we got there, there were no outbound flights to anywhere near San Francisco, so I stood in line for 3 hours to get a new ticket. They gave me some voucher thing and told me that I had to be back at the airport at 4:45 am.
I decided I’d just stay since it was only about 4 hours at that point. I did what the “nice” lady told me and gave the voucher thing to the United Airlines people. They had never seen anything like it, and in fact told me I had no seat, and put me on standby. The plane was already severely overbooked and needless to say, I wasn’t getting a seat. I went back to customer service, and stood around another hour to get a plane that was scheduled to leave around 3:30. Then I attempted to take a nap near the gate so I could try to keep from becoming completely delirious. It didn’t work too well with some monstrous children jumping up and down on a nearby seat and good Samaritans waking me up to make sure I wasn’t missing whichever flight happened to be going out at that moment.
I decided to check on my flight status, and lo and behold! It was delayed 90 minutes for maintenance. I decided that was going to be a problem and started looking for alternatives. I couldn’t find anything, but heard an announcement over the loud-speaker that there was a plane leaving for San Francisco and last call to get on. I ran over there and managed to score myself a seat (window even) to get out of there. I figured my baggage was already in California or was forever lost and I’d get it around Christmas of the following year. Somehow, miracle of miracles, they actually got my luggage on the plane and everything delivered to California. Of course my suitcase looks like someone took a chainsaw to parts of it, but the contents are safe.
All in all, I made it home, but the moral of the story is tri-fold:
1) Never fly US Airways. Unless you like airlines that book you on full flights that were full weeks prior to the flight date, blame the weather, then have no one available to fix it by phone and only employ 1 customer service representative at the busiest time of year, and
2) Never fly in or out of Philadelphia
3) If there’s a blizzard and you’re flying, just rebook for 2-3 days later and save yourself the agony.
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