Today's another day to find you

[austin_dern]

Airport '14, the conclusion. bunny_hugger tells me she dubbed it Flightmare.

With bunny_hugger dropped off at the airport I waited a little while, but got back in the car and started driving home. My original plan, when she was to leave from Trenton about noon, was that I'd go into the office for a half-day and so get ahead of the stuff I could usefully do in there. That obviously went out the window with the Philadelphia diversion; even if I drove straight for the office I'd get there like fifteen minutes before the end of the day. So I drove for home instead, something that took me right by the office anyway, but did let me get a wonderful view of the Trenton Makes The World Takes bridge.

I staggered back into my parents' home, after an hour and a half or so driving from Philadelphia and all the chaos swirling around that. I gave my father the recap of what had gone on, and what had gone wrong, and how bunny_hugger had gotten her flight after all, and I started gathering my stuff from the guest room to pack into suitcases and get over to the hotel. My father promised me it was fine if I stayed until Wednesday, the day they projected to move out; but, I didn't want to. For one, I don't want to burden them more than I have to. For another, being around the ratcheting stress of their final weeks in their home was part of what was beating me down. (Also, a hotel near the office meant I could expect to sleep in an hour later, rather than commuting, and that meant I could be less beaten down by the end of the work week or be up an extra hour talking with bunny_hugger online.) He understood all this, and suggested that I really ought to call the hotel and make sure they still had my reservation.

You know those jokes that chill you with fear? This was one of them. But the hotel had my reservation, and I told them great, I should be there in a bit over an hour, and they said they'd be glad to see me. So all was well.

Then bunny_hugger phoned.

The rebooked flight had been cancelled. Who knows. Maybe they figured too many people were getting where they needed to go and they had to rebalance things. She went through yet another round of chaos at the airport, but this time, since Philadelphia isn't such a rinky-dink airport, and since US Airways was apparently not breaking in new trainees on a catastrophe day, she was able to get a new booking. Except ...

She had planned to get from Detroit's airport back to Lansing by taking the Michigan Flyer, a pretty comfortable bus, complete with Wi-Fi and power cords and complimentary bottled water and all that, and had got a reservation for that. But her rebooked flight would get in too late to catch even the final bus, even if it arrived on time, and if it were a little late all she could possibly do was wait at Detroit airport until 5 am or so and the start of the new day. You know what sleeping overnight at an airport is like. And this would be after a long day in which the only thing she'd gotten to eat was a hummus-and-chips pack from Wawa; everything in the world would be closed by the time she got to Detroit.

But she'd have an option. We had driven to Detroit in my car and left it in long-term parking. She had a spare set of keys. She hates driving my car, not liking the feel of the brakes, and hates driving in snow, which Michigan had in fresh amounts because that's the way this winter has gone, and she especially hates driving my car in snow. But given the alternatives, she'd rather drive my car in the snow. Which was great except that the ticket to get the car out of long-term parking was tucked in my messenger bag, with me, in central New Jersey.

If I left right away, and drove to Philadelphia as fast as possible, and nothing went wrong, I might be able to catch bunny_hugger and hand her the ticket and let her race back to catch her flight. I had to try. I stuffed everything I could into the car, and hugged my father and wished him well, and was sorry that my mother wasn't home yet but what could I do, and I left my parents' house and their development for what I trusted was the last time, without taking a goodbye photograph or reflecting on the end of this era, and started racing west and then south again, speeding and growing more anxious about that every mile.

My camera, of course, I left somewhere on the bed.

bunny_hugger called to share her anxieties about this, and my meager reports of how far I'd gotten, and the news about how much closer the departure time was. And she started to worry about her luggage, which had been originally checked with a tag sending it to Detroit on a new-cancelled flight. She'd gotten rebooked not by an agent in the Philadelphia airport but by someone on a special secret line --- a US Airways guy went around handing out cards to the hotline dealing with that airport crisis --- and she had a perfectly reasonable fear that her bag was in the Land of Lost Luggage, possibly because they might have expected her to re-claim it and re-check it and if they had announced that she'd missed it. I could do nothing but take my best guesses about how airlines work and say that, well, if they lose it, they'll find it in a couple days, and is there anything she absolutely must have in the next couple days? No, not that she couldn't let slip to Wednesday or Friday even.

Still, it's a long way to the Philadelphia airport, and the time was tight, and the time available for me to park and rush the ticket in was lost, and we figured on me driving up to the departing passenger drop-off spot and try to arrange a meeting point where we could get one another on the very first try because if I had to loop around the airport again she would certainly miss her flight. But she was worried, and I was worried, and time was pressing, and the distance wasn't dwindling nearly enough, and I was speeding and narrating where I was and trying to figure where bunny_hugger could be so we could catch each other on that first try and ...

She didn't see me driving in. I saw her at the edge of the terminal. I started flashing my lights and pulling over to the side. She saw me. I rolled the window down and fumbled handing her the ticket and we yelled our love at one another and she fled back indoors.

I went to short-term parking. After all this I wasn't going to leave until her plane was safely in the air. Possibly not until it had landed. Meanwhile, I would learn, she discovered that they had closed security at terminal B, where she was and where her flight was taking off from, so she had to run to terminal C, go through security there, and run back to terminal B. Mercifully, her flight had been delayed ten minutes, and she just made it.

I sat in the airport, watching the monitor boards, and feeling grateful that there was that ten-minute delay. I hoped it might roll over to a fifteen-minute delay for a tiny bit more margin, or even twenty minutes, but not so much that they would cancel the flight. But they didn't: it held at ten minutes, and I watched the flight status switch over to Departed, and I waited a good fifteen minutes after that before flopping over, deflated, and finally starting to shed the boulders of anxiety that had been crushing me all day.

I drove again up I-95, this time to the hotel, though I again went past (but not on) the Trenton Makes The World Takes bridge, which lead me to discover that my satellite navigator wasn't really able to find the hotel right away. (The hotel was on a numbered route and the satellite navigator does not handle those well, probably because of ambiguities about is it Route or Rte or Rt or US Route or USR or whatnot to start with, and the programmers were idiots.) But I found the place, and checked in, and unpacked stuff, and looked for news from bunny_hugger that she had landed or was on the road again or had got my car or anything. There was no news by the time I had to go to bed.

She had landed safely, and her luggage was there without trouble, and she got my car out of hock easily. The roads were horrible but she was able to follow the lane carved out of the snow by other traffic, and the only fault of it was this was all very slow and she got back in horribly late. But the house was well, our fish were well, and she could go to bed.

Trivia: The Reuters day-duty log for the 15-16 February 1941 began, ``There was no big foreign news''. Source: The Power Of News: The History of Reuters, Donald Read.

Currently Reading: Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery, Frank Spencer.

PS: Reading the Comics, February 1, 2014, a fresh roundup of mathematics-themed comics.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

It took us all ages to get our luggage. The rumor going around is that it was because the cargo doors had frozen shut. It also took me over two hours to drive what is normally a 90 minute drive back home because I had to drive 45 miles an hour almost the whole way. Between those two things, I did not get back until about 2:30 a.m., having spent since 10 a.m. in this flightmare and having eaten only a small hummus and pita package from Wawa in the morning and then a package of wasabi peas at some point in the afternoon. If my parents hadn't (without asking me) called around until they found a company that would go out that same day and shovel (it was too deep to snowblow) my driveway, I would not have been able to pull the car in when I got there.

The airport's chaos was indescribable. Flights were cancelling all over the place. The line to get to the customer service desk at United was like a line on a busy day at Cedar Point (amusement park). I stood in it for an hour and when I was near what I thought was the front, another person in line ran forward, took a peek, and came back to report that there were actually about 300 more people in front of us -- because out of sight was actually a whole switchback queue area that we were about to enter. That was the point when the US Airways guy came around with a card with a special "weather emergency rebooking" number to call and as soon as I called that I was connected with someone right away and didn't have to stand in the rest of the line. It did mean I forgot to check on what I was supposed to do about the luggage from the cancelled flight, so it's some miracle that they did move my luggage correctly to my later flight. (I was all but certain I'd left my luggage in Philadelphia and was so relieved when it showed up -- one of the last few pieces on the conveyor -- in Detroit.)

[moxie_man]

"too deep to snowblow"

I've dealt with 3 ft (~1 meter) of snow with my woosy little 3.5 horse 2-stage blower. You just can't take it in smaller (more narrow) chunks. You simply can't do the full width of the blower.

But it was still nice of your folks to take care of the problem for you.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Well, this was a landscaping company and they apparently sent out guys with shovels to do it. They must have had their reasons, but I don't claim to know the business. It's certainly true I would have had no place to put the car had I come home without them having done that, since there was a snow emergency declaration and street parking was thus forbidden, but I could not have gotten it into the driveway.

For additional fun, it was below zero and the wind chills were in the territory that causes the NWS to put out "stay inside" warnings. This was January 6/early morning January 7 by the time I got home.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I imagine that snow removal is the most useful thing to do with landscaping company during the winter months, and I guess it gives the day laborer pool the chance to starve a little less. But from the weather conditions as described and how many warnings were given … I don't know how the work could be done safely.

[moxie_man]

I'm still surprised they hand shoveled it. The landscaping companies around here usually also do snow removal in the winter for the very reason that Austin mentions--keeps their employees working through the winter. Around here, the landscape trucks have plows mounted on them and they have rather large snowblowers either in the back of the truck or towed behind in a trailer for the driveways where there's no place to push the snow due to a garage or what have you.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

All I know is they told my parents the snow could not be blown. (It does not help that my driveway runs side by side with someone else's and for half its length the house is on the other side, so the frustrating thing is that there's nowhere to put snow until you get halfway down and can start throwing it to the yard.)

[moxie_man]

Sounds somewhat like our yard, except we don't share a driveway. Our house blocks one side and a row of lilac bushes, which I trim every two years, blocks the other side. So, I have a small strip up at the top of the driveway where I can blow sideways. The back is 3/4's blocked thanks to the pool fence and shed, leaving me a narrow gap to blow it down over the hill out back.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Right now the pile of snow in the yard hasn't quite reached as tall as either of us, but it's certainly looking to get there, especially since apparently we just can't even get near freezing at all this winter.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Our snow blower's only good for a couple of inches at a time. For the typical daily snowfall it's pretty good, at least up to the last rows of the driveway when it has to clear not just the three inches that fell overnight but all the snow that's been blown off the rest of the driveway, but at fifteen inches there's just no way. The intake isn't even fifteen inches tall.

[moxie_man]

Mine isn't that large either. The intake is probably 18 inches across and maybe...maybe 12 inches tall (45cm and 30cm for our non-USA followers). Anything deeper than 4 or so inches, I have to take narrower strips of driveway on each pass. I've done up to 3 feet deep, but it's not fun and takes a long time, especially with only one place to put the snow.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

You know, it strikes me that the chaos in Philadelphia and I imagine Detroit was probably akin to what the airports out east were like just after Sandy passed. We managed to avoid the chaos by having a flight too early to be doomed, but, if we'd booked a late-morning flight instead we might've lived through that but in Connecticut.

I suppose the door freezing shut is as plausible an event as any for the airplane. Since it was about zero Fahrenheit and undoubtedly even worse than normal at altitude … well, I guess that'll happen.

If I had any conception of what the airport was like and if I'd had any sense I'd have passed you some candy bars or something along with the ticket.

[moxie_man]

Well, at least she got home in less than 24 hours.

One of my trips home from Lubbock, TX to Maine for Christmas break took about 27 hours. At that time, Delta used a an ATR turboprop out of Lubbock to Dallas that the FAA had banned from flying in subfreezing weather 'cause no matter how much deicing you apply to it, it still freezes up in mid-flight and tends to crash.

We had an ice storm the morning of my departure (scheduled for noon). The PA system was not working at the check-in area 90 minutes before the scheduled flight. So, I missed that there were seats available on an American Airlines jet for anyone who was willing to swap over since all of Delta's flights were cancelled due to the ice. I only caught word as the AA jet pulled away from the gate, and apparently, it wasn't full. It would be the last flight to leave Lubbock that day.

I wound-up "flying" Greyhound on Delta's dime from Lubbock to Dallas. The "flight" left Lubbock around 2pm and was full. We pulled into Dallas 8 hours later. They ran out of courtesy hotel room vouchers 3 people in front of me. It was now approaching midnight and I learned my rebooked flight was leaving Dallas at 6am, so a hotel room wouldn't have done me much good anyway. So, I went to my gate, sat myself down BLOCKING the departure door to ensure I wouldn't sleep through boarding time, and snoozed for 5 hours.

Fortunately, for me my connecting flight in Boston was the same plane. So, after informing the stewardess of this, I slept all the way to Boston and from Boston to Bangor, landing in Bangor at noon. And then another hour on the road (mother drove) to get home.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That is a worse travel venture than she had, yes, and worse than ones I've had. Come to it, her brother had a worse experience than she did, getting out here for Cristmas, although it wasn't so awful as that.

My most exhausting flying was the Newark-to-Singapore transit, but that's more one of endurance than anything else, because it's eighteen hours of flight time with stopovers in Chicago or Hong Kong or maybe Taipei.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, my brother said that he thought mine was worse because although I didn't spend as much total time in the airport, mine was more nightmarish for the stress. His was boring rather than stressful.

[moxie_man]

Mine may have been longer, but hers was way, way more stressful. I figured I wouldn't even get out of Lubbock with the weather forecast that day. My only complaint was the lack of a working PA when they announced the seats available on the other plane that no one heard. The missing out on the hotel room didn't bother me 'cause by then, I was too exhausted to really care and it was just icing on the cake at that point. Somewhere deep down, I was expecting that to happen, but had to go through the motion of trying to get one anyway rather than just go straight to check-in my baggage and flop down in the terminal.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It probably was more stressful as bunny_hugger had to suffer through a never-ending series of close calls and last-minute cancellations and general confusion. But it was just horrible throughout.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

We need teleportation technology now.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm mostly agreed, although I admit I do like the time that airplanes and trains and buses give me to read without interruption or distraction.

[moxie_man]

No thanks. With the "wonderful" quality of today's electronics construction, I'd wind-up like the poor soul at the beginning of the very first Star Trek movie.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of some of the throwaway bits in Arthur C Clarke's ``Travel By Wire!'' actually.