June 12 and 13

I am writing in the Panama City airport, on the first day of our trip.  Tropical Storm Alberto is heading towards the Big Bend of Florida, to our east, and we are getting light showers from it.  The rain is badly needed, but I have a sinking feeling that our flight schedules may be affected.  Sure enough, our 1:25 flight is delayed due to heavy thunderstorms in Atlanta.  We log on to the airport’s free WiFi and find radar showing a line stretching from Atlanta all the way back to Birmingham, with some tornado warnings just east of the airport.  Last we heard, we were delayed till at least 3.  The plane is sitting right outside the window, ready to go, but we have this weather shutting down Hartsfield…and we are going to have to fly over, around, or thru it to get to Atlanta.

We decided that we were going to miss our connection to Seattle, so Lana went to the desk and got the agent to set us up some new flights.  We were able to get new, later flights with the same routing, so now we would be arriving in Fairbanks about 2am, instead of midnight.

The flight to Atlanta finally took off sometime after 3, and the turbulence through the thunderstorms was not as bad as I expected, but they did have to divert us around the worst of it, adding about 30 minutes to our flight.  We arrived with about an hour to kill, so we had a quick dinner at a Chili’s, then went to our gate…to find that our next leg, Atlanta to Seattle, was delayed another two hours!  The flight crew was coming in from Orlando, which was wrapped up with thunderstorms from TS Alberto, so there was no one there to fly the plane!  This meant that we would miss our new Seattle to Fairbanks connection.  I sat with the bags while Lana went to reschedule us AGAIN.  A few minutes later she came back, tossed the tickets at me, and said “You deal with it, they are saying that they can’t get us there until 9PM tomorrow night!”  My heart sank.  I went to the counter and talked to the ladies there, who were polite and professional.  We looked at all sorts of routing options, but since it was late in the day, all available flights were booked.  We finally settled on a schedule that would route us through Anchorage and get us into Fairbanks about noon on the 13^th…not good, but better than 9PM.  We would have a 6-hour layover in Seattle.  “Will Delta put us up?” I asked.  “Not for weather delays” was the reply.  We would spend the night in the airport.

Our by-now-very-late flight to Seattle boarded little later than it was supposed to, and we sat on the plane for 45 minutes before we pushed back from the gate.  Someone had to get off the plane due to an asthma attack, and they had to find their bags and remove them.  We could not get seats side-by-side, so Lana was one row behind me, and I chatted with a 26-year-old mechanical engineer from Seattle that had just broken up with her boyfriend.  I got about two hours of sleep, and we arrived in Seattle right at midnight.

There are a couple of lessons to be learned from this.  First, I broke my personal rule of always trying to get the first flight out of town in the morning.  The logic behind the rule is that if a flight gets cancelled, you at least have the rest of the day’s schedule to choose from to re-route.  But we left after noon, and by the time we realized we had a problem, there were no other available flights to get us to our destinations.  Second lesson…when traveling across country, give yourself an extra travel day at your destination in case something like this happens.  What if we had a cruise or a tour or some other expensive, non-refundable activity set up?  We would have been hosed.  And a side note…a week earlier, some friends had flown out of our town to Seattle for a cruise.  Their connections got messed up both ways…8 hours late going out, 12 hours late coming home.

Earlier in the day, I had called American Express.  I had made our Fairbanks hotel reservations through their travel service.  I was holding out hope that our Seattle-Fairbanks leg would ALSO be delayed (Seattle has a pretty bad reputation for late flights), and that we still might be able to make it.  Amex told me that I had a 24-hour cancellation rule on the hotel, so I was stuck with the room for tonight, whether I made it or not, so I decided just to leave the reservation in place, in case we got amazingly lucky and made it.  Our 45-minute wait at the gate just reduced our chances even more, and when we arrived at Seattle, all of the gates were closed, so there was not even anybody to talk to.  I called Delta on the cell phone, and they confirmed that our old Seattle-Fairbanks flight had left about an hour earlier, and that the schedule that we now had was the best we could do.

Time to find a place to sleep.

They guy sitting across the aisle was reading “Two Wheels Through Terror”, so I struck up a conversation.  He was from Fairbanks, rode a BMW 650, and was planning a trip to South America.

When we woke up we walked outside and sat in the sun waiting for Mom.  She had flown in 3 days earlier, to take a guided tour up to Deadhorse, and was flying back to Fairbanks today.  I could not remember if her flight was due at 6 or 8, and could not remember the name of the tour company she was with.  I went through the local phone book and found a tour company with a familiar-sounding name.  The reception girl did not have the passenger manifest, but said that their Deadhorse flight was arriving between 8 and 9:30!  That was later than we expected, so we decided to go find something to eat (it was now a little after 6).  We walked out to Old Airport Road and spied a Subway in the distance.  As we started walking to it, my phone rang, it was Mom, and she was at the hotel!  I suppose I had called the wrong tour company.   Anyway, she asked us to bring her back some dinner.  We got 4 6-inch subs for $10.99, walked back, and had dinner with Mom and looked at her pictures, then hit the sack.

I should mention that Mom took her Deadhorse tour with Northern Alaska Tour Company, and later said that it was the best part of the trip.

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