Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Ten on Tuesday: Travel Edition

1)  Before leaving for Denver, we ate up all the perishable food in the house.  One of our last couple meals before leaving was spaghetti with meat sauce.  We bought some Parmesan cheese to grate on top.


If you want to know if the Parmesan is "real" Parmesan, look for the stamp on the rind:


Make sure you look really excited when you grate the Parmesan onto your pasta ;-)


2)  The couple days before we left we had absolutely no groceries in the house.  We went out for dinner to Swiss Chalet one day, and to Montana's with friends/family Mel and Steve the next.


3)  Our flight for Denver was scheduled to leave on Wednesday.  We went through security, where I got the full pat-down, we grabbed coffees, and waited to board our flight.


4)  We sat on the plane for a good 2 hours, waiting for the weather to improve.  I read a couple magazines and prayed that we'd get off the ground.


5)  The weather didn't improve and everyone was invited to get off of the plane and wait for more news.  We didn't want to get off! 


We stuck around a little longer, but eventually our flight was delayed until the next morning :-(

6)  We were so sad.  We went out for supper to Lancaster to try and pretend we were on vacation. 


This pretending was ruined when we had to go home to sleep.  Boo!

7)  Our new flight was scheduled to leave for 9:00 a.m. Thursday morning.  We were at the airport for 5:30, as we still didn't know if we were confirmed on the flight, and we were told to show up very early.  We boarded late, around 9:45, which was frustrating.  We then sat on the plane for hours - again.  The engine was not covered the night before and it froze.  They blew hot air in the engine to melt the ice.  Once that problem was fixed, the engine has a major malfunction!  We were asked to get off the plane again, and were told that our flight was cancelled and wouldn't be rescheduled until Friday morning, at which time they hoped it would be fixed!!


8)  We spent the entire day in the airport, stressed out, waiting in lines and on the phone for hours, and looking at flights to Vegas, Toronto, etc., in a desperate attempt to just get away somewhere.  After Christopher waited in a line for about two hours for food vouchers and a hotel voucher (we were NOT going to go home to sleep again), a kind soul told him that she had one seat on a flight to Denver for 3:30.  He took that seat and went on the standby list.  Eventually, after a string of stressful events, the kind soul pulled a few strings she didn't have to pull and got us both on the flight.  We were so relived that we didn't have to go home again and lose two days of our trip. 

9)  By this time, we were both exhausted.  I got a coffee with cream, and was a little disturbed by the ingredient list on the "cream". 


I didn't use it.

10)  This third flight took off without incident.  We arrived in Denver and headed to our beautiful Hotel, The Warwick.  The room was huge with a walk-in closet, separate bedroom and balcony.  It also has a rooftop pool that is open year round!  Nice!


We wanted to make the most of our little vacation, so we didn't sleep much over the next few days.

How was your long weekend?  
Do you have any travel/airport horror stories?

2 comments:

Lisa from Lisa's Yarns said...

First off - I totally thought of you when I saw that Bacon Edition of the food network magazine!!

That is an awful travel experience. I am glad you eventually got off ok, but it sucks that your weekend was cut short. I think my worst travel experience was coming back from Paris in 2011. My initial flight got canceled due to a blizzard in MN, so they re-routed me through Atlanta. Both my Paris>Atlanta and Atlanta>Minneapolis flights were delayed and then had medical emergencies that required us to go back to the gate after we were ready to take off. And then my luggage got lost. But that is not bad compared to what you guys went through with the rolling cancellations!

Anonymous said...

The one time I flew United (which I assume you guys did to Denver), I said I never would again. Late departure, missed our connections, were extremely rude about getting us onto another flight (because it wasn't their problem - ha!). We finally made it to Phoenix, but with 2 toddlers in tow, it was NOT fun. Not to mention the family of 6 that got bumped from one of the flights on the way back because of course the flight was oversold. Glad you guys made it! I took a look at some of the eats you've been enjoying and I was drooling :)