I’m never making Spring Break Plans again.
Seriously. Since I’ve started college, it’s been impossible for me to have a successful Spring Break that involves me planning a trip out of town.
Yeah…I didn’t take my laptop to NYC, if you’re wondering. In fact…I never made it to NYC. I sit here and type from my room. Oh yes, I shall explain shortly the insanity in which we called Friday.
Freshman year- stayed home. Believe had decent time (honestly can’t remember much).
Sophomore year- first attempt to travel with Holly to Natchez. Got mysterious illness (called pneumonia, but doctors misdiagnosed and I went untreated and medically tested for the rarest of rare diseases for a month-except Crohn’s…shoulda tested for that one).
Junior year- Planned to go to Natchez, again. Crohn’s Disease. Need I say more?
Senior year- Plans to go to Natchez with Holly fell through so I was left with nothing to do. My dad knew that I always wanted to go to NY and he’d never been. A plan was born.
Got up at 4AM and made it to the airport at 5AM. Checked in without a hitch and waited for the 6AM flight (smaller airports make it easier to check in if you’re wondering about the one hour time-span). CNN was on and they started talking about the weather in the Northeast and how Delta and Jet Blue were cancelling a few flights. Of course…flying Delta.
But we take off and fly to Atlanta because the airline doesn’t think anything should be wrong with our flight…at the moment. We get there around 7:30 CT and hang out for our 11:30 connecting flight. I go to the bathroom around 10 and walk by the big board going in and see that all of the flights before ours are cancelled. Our? Said “On Time.” After I leave the bathroom: “Cancelled.”
Needless to say, we weren’t alone. I believe there were approximately 8000 passengers on Delta at Atlanta that had their flights cancelled according to one worker. NY, NJ, CT, MA, PA, NH, MD…you name a state in the Northeast and it was shutdown.
And the kicker was that we asked how soon they could get us there and they said that if we booked a flight that second then Monday morning. We were about an hour back in the booking line though, so who really knows. And they said that we couldn’t find rooms in Atlanta for the weekend either…due to ST. Patty’s Day and a frickin’ NASCAR race there wasn’t a single room to be found in Atlanta before the shutdown!
So my dad and I decided to just try and get back home. Especially since we didn’t have our luggage. The very helpful ticket woman said that we could go and try to reclaim our bags but that it would take at least 4.5 hours. There was a flight leaving in 4 hours to come back home. She said that her recommendation was that we get home and worry about the bags later. File and missing bag report in Springfield and hopefully see our bags next week. Maybe sooner since I went to high school with a girl that seems to be a Delta manager here at SGF (she said I could call her later last night to check on things, but I fell asleep around 9 and figured my luck just wouldn’t run that hot to get the bags back that soon).
So yeah…back home. Pretty disappointed, but not too upset. Still better than my last two Spring Breaks!
I hope the poor Brazilian that my dad and I temporary adopted (he was a foreign exchange student pretty new to America and just trying to get to NY to see friend) made it somewhere. He was pretty nervous but my dad let him follow us for nearly 2 hours and even let him use my cell phone to call someone in Virginia and see if he could arrange new plans.
Today will be devoted to sleeping, canceling our restaurant reservations, cancelling any remaining hotel reservations (I doubt Travelocity did because I got frustrated and hung up on the guy I waited 30 min to talk to) and figure out a way to bitch-slap that roaming gnome because I think he’s going to charge us for a vacation we didn’t get to take.
Also…I need to check on my show tickets. They say non-refundable for any reason, but I gotta try for the sake of principle. In the meantime…ANYONE WHO KNOWS SOMEONE IN THE NYC AREA WHO WOULD LIKE TO GO TO SPAMALOT TONIGHT…LET ME KNOW!! Seriously. I have 2 tickets (2nd row premium seats that we paid $250 a seat for-my dad was going all out) that I would be willing to sell dirt cheap. I’m not even opposed to giving them away since I hate the thought of just letting them go to waste.
EDIT- I actually got a refund on the tickets. Now If I could just get in touch with that roaming gnome!!
Yeah…not exactly what I planned for this Saturday. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!!