Vacation Update!! (Worst journey ever)
Ok, before anyone gets the wrong idea... we're having a great time now that we're here. But...
Actually, even the flight from Norway to the US went without a hitch. The kids behaved, there was food, there were movies... I think I even dozed for a while. The worst part about the flight is sitting around eight hours in a space of a seat and nowhere to put your legs. And the time difference, I guess. We got up at around 5:00 CET (Central European Time - GMT+1), got on our plane around 11:30, then landed at Newark a little ahead of schedule around 13:45. Fair enough. So far, so good.
So, we landed, collected our luggage (this is normally when the hitch is) and went to check in for our next flight, from Newark to Rochester. The automatic check-in machine said, "Please contact an agent. Your itinerary has been changed." Ok, fair enough, there's a delay, right? So we found an agent (they sound so secretive that way - she had a name though, not a number, even if I don't remember what it was), and she looked us up in the system.
"Ah, right, here you are. Your flight has been canceled and... whooaahwhoahwhoah!"
We knew we were in trouble.
I should note before I continue that we were traveling on the 19th of July.
"Your flight has been canceled, and your new flight leaves on the 21st."
"The 21st!?"
"Yes, today is the 19th, the 21st is on..."
"I know what day it is!"
It kind of degenerated after that. Apparently some bad weather had knocked out computer systems at Newark and there were flights being canceled all over the place. There were, in fact, no flights to Rochester in two days that weren't either canceled or fully booked. We were offered a hotel room for the night so we could be on standby the whole next day to then most likely end up at the hotel again for another night. That really sucks when you're just two adults traveling.
With a four-month-old and a three-year-old? Fuck that.
So we went looking for a rental car to drive up. All gone because of the cancellations. You're never making it to the head of the line when you're traveling with toddlers and babies. And even if we weren't I'm pretty sure the cars were gone before we even landed.
Next I called my mom in CT, whom we were actually supposed to visit at the end of the trip. However, the solution finally became to take the Amtrak from Newark to New Haven (packed train and, of course, the A/C was broken), where we were picked up so we could crash at her place before picking up a rental from there and driving to Rochester the next day. We had a bit of a late start due to getting kid seats set up and some other stuff, so we didn't roll into Rochester until roughly 22:00-22:30... over 26 hours later than we were supposed to.
Bleh!
Anyway, since then vacation has been great. :) Having family around to help with the kids rocks, we get to go out a bit, the dollar is weak so everything's even more dirt cheap than it usually is and we've already seen Mark a couple of times. We'll be going to see the Simpsons movie this weekend, so that'll be good too. :)