Until Ed gets our Mexico pictures off his camera, my post about our New Year's trip to Las Alamandes will have to wait. In the meantime, here's a brief account of my adventure with the aptly named Hercules storm that blasted us on Friday:
Some of my college friends who follow this sort of thing informed me that Vanderbilt, not usually a stellar football school, was going to play a bowl game in early January. Those of us without kids and other obligations (an increasingly small group) decided to arrange a trip to Atlanta, where we'd stay at the home of two of our friends and then drive to Birmingham to watch the game. I would be in New York for something like 50 hours between the end of our Mexico trip and the launch of my Atlanta trip and was a bit nervous about all the laundry and un/repacking I'd have to do; it came as a relief, therefore, when my boss declared on Thursday that we'd work from home on Friday instead of coming to the office. He was worried about all of our out-of-town employees (i.e. everyone but me) making the trip from New Jersey and Long Island.
As I worked on Friday, popping up occasionally to throw more clothes into the washing machine, I kept an eye on my flight status. We'd gotten a good six inches of snow the night before, but no more was falling and the sky was clear. I figured I'd be fine--New York airports are used to dealing with snow, right?--and for a while it seemed I was right. Then Delta started sending me emails. My 6:30 flight would now leave at 7:30. Now 8:00. Now 8:30. When I left the house at 6:30, 8:30 was still the predicted departure time. I picked my way along an slushy sidewalk with suitcase in hand, weaving in between people literally bundled up to the eyeballs. Part of a bench on the subway platform had been dripped upon from a street-level grate above and was covered with ice.
The subway was slower than usual, and so was the AirTrain. I was worried that I would be late for my flight, but I needn't have been; when I got above ground, I consulted my phone and discovered that it had been pushed back to 9:00. Inside the airport, I passed a very long line of people at the customer service desk. As I was the only person in the security line, I essentially walked into the terminal and settled in with my laptop to wait. It was freezing and people around me were wrapped in those thin fleece airline blankets you usually see only on planes. Some of them looked as though they'd been there for a long, long time; people had set up small camps and were sleeping, eating, and gazing blankly and rather hopelessly into the distance.
Every half an hour or so, an announcement would be made that things had been pushed back. For a while, I decided to stick it out, but by 10:00 I was growing tired and feeling pessimistic. I was scheduled to come back to New York early Sunday afternoon, and I didn't want to spend as much time traveling to my destination as I would spend actually being there. An announcement was made that free pizza was available to waiting customers. This worried me. I'd never known an airline to be so generous and figured that things must be bad indeed. I inquired about whether I could get a credit for a future flight and was told to call customer service. When I did, the wait time was estimated at 3-4 hours. At least. I used an option that would cause the airline to call me back when someone was available to speak to me and went to try the line at the service desk. People had pulled a line of wheelchairs into it. Everyone waiting was sitting, and there was absolutely no forward movement during the 15 minutes that I stood there. I figured that they must have been scheduled for cancelled flights and have no other option but to wait. I did have an option, though. I went home.
In the morning, I received a call from the airline at 11:45, about 13 hours after I'd initially called. I was given a credit for another flight to Atlanta, which I'll use sometime in spring to go visit my friends. Ed's cousin, a resourceful travel agent, told us that the flight I was supposed to take had ended up leaving at 3:18 A.M. Had I waited for it, I'd have landed in Atlanta with just enough time for my friends to pick me up on the wait to Birmingham for the game.
Hercules certainly won that round. While I was sorry the weekend didn't go as planned, I'll look forward to another shot at it in spring, when there is no chance of being snowed in.
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