Tuesday, December 18, 2012

www.StoryIsn'tOver.com

I thought the story ended there, but now as I’m sitting waiting for my flight that was supposed to take off 15 minutes ago, we, the passengers of the flight are all still sitting in the airport waiting for some pilots to show up to fly the plane.  The flight attendants have been on the plane for 5-6 hours already, but somehow we didn’t get any pilots scheduled to fly it I booked this flight a month ago, you’d think that was a enough time to plan for someone to fly my back. I haven’t done a lot of flying around Christmas, but the view before me  is what I pictured. There are people sitting on the floor because the flight is a full one. There were flights out of this airport cancelled earlier today, so a lot of these people have already altered their plans to this flight and now this. People are frustrated. People are standing ready to go. They’re on their phones changing their plans.  I’m getting hungry and wondering if I should get food because this flight is 3 hours once we get on it, which means it will be either around 11pm when I get to Denver, Ontario time.   They’re announcing right now that they have no idea what’s going to happen, because of the Baltimore flight that was cancelled early has thrown a monkey wrench into the situation. They’re going to start calling people up by destination to start re-routing them. Now they are offering to refund, even non-refundable tickets if people are interested in cancelling their flights.                                  

So 2 hours later, I’m still sitting in the same spot. They have found us pilots. We’re set to depart here at 11:45 pm instead of 7:20. I have found a ride home from the airport because I can’t ask Justine to pick up me up in the middle of the night, when her day starts at 5am!   It’s also hard to complain about this flight issue when for the last 7 hours I’ve heard nothing but news on the shooting of 20+ 6 year old children who had no less than 3 bullets in each kid.       

So you know that episode in Friends where Rachel is in Labour and pregnant women come into her room, and then leave and all have their babies before her. That’s how all 135 of us have felt about the planes at gate D21. We are at Gate D23 the one beside it who got here first and have seen at least 3 planes come and gone since we got here.  Our pilots have landed and Flight 1216 will be boarding in 10 minutes! Finally I’ve been here in the same spot for 8 hours, with 3 potty breaks. That’s a long time, and I still have a 3+ hour flight ahead of me. 

The flight was really shakey on the way down, the landing was good, but the long awaited pilots were all over the place coming into the airport. Tyler was sooo kind and was at the airport waiting for me at 1am. By the time we got home it was 2:45! The  airport was shut down for the most part! It was the weirdest to be there in the middle of the night.  Tyler carried all my bags into my apartment for me, gave me a hug and was off! He deserves a medal!  2:45 Denver Time is 4:45am Ontario time and I got up at 7am Ontario time.....

I bonded with 3 other people while on this adventure! 2 of them were a brother sister Punjabi combo who go to Wayne State and a UofM (remote location), and the other girl was in her 1st year at UofMgh  swimming on their Water Polo Team! It was a fun bunch to go through this experience with. We had some great conversations, a lot of them revolving around the shooting and gun control. On the plane I chatted with the Indian boy almost the whole flight! They were flying to Seattle to meet their brothers 4 day old baby and spend Christmas there! They other girl was on her way home for the holidays to California. Both of them were given a free hotel and their connecting flight was paid for, however the California girls' next flight got cancelled again right before we took off from DET to DEN. Poor girl! I hope she makes it home!

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