Yay! - or maybe not :-(Follow

I may very well have been wearing my trench-coat at the time.

When I was seventeen I flew to Seattle from Colorado Springs with my girlfriend at the time. Our seats were not next to one another, and I ended up sitting on the aisle next to a baby and its mother. The baby cried like you wouldn't believe, and its head swelled to the size of a beach ball and pulsed inhumanly. At one point I looked the mother square in her eyes and asked: What is wrong with your baby? Then the ceiling of the plane peeled back and the sky shone through.

This all had less to do with the airline and more to do with the sugar-cube and two Flinstone vitamins I ate before the flight.

Edited, Sep 19th 2006 at 10:21pm EDT by Barkingturtle

(Long post warning)

My recent trip to Detroit was one of the worst collections of things gone wrong I ever experienced during years of travel. I am used to missing a piece of luggage or the occasional connection due to a delayed flight. However, this while trip was sh*t on by the great gohd of travel Karma.

It all started because I tried to be the good employee and go into work for a few hours before making the two hour drive to the Las Vegas airport. As is usually the case right before a trip, there was a crisis at work and I started my drive half an hour late wearing a shirt stained with dirty brake fluid. Upon my arrival at the airport, I found the parking deck to be extremly full and had to do laps all the way up to the uncovered section. This did not help my time situation.

The next step, check-in and baggage check, did not go well either. The e-ticket was no problem, but the f*cktards at Northworst only had two baggage check counters open. There was a long line, and it was moving slowly. Still, it wouldn't have been a problem if both counters had continued to process luggage. After about five minutes, action at counter number one came to a grinding halt. I don't know what issue the passengers trying to check their baggage created, but counter one was out for 20+ minutes. Within minutes of the counter one shutdown, the guy at counter two wanders off. WTF! I guess he had to go take a sh*t, but baggage checking was literally shut down for ten solid minutes. By the time he returned and my bag was on the belt, I had lost over forty minutes.

With my suitcase checked, I had just enough time to run to the plane and board at last call. They shut the door soon after I arrived. I had planned to change my stained shirt, but there was no chance.

If I remember correctly, the first plane landed in Minneapolis. As is frequently the case there, the weather was sh*t. As a result, we sat in the airplane for an hour waiting for a thunderstorm to pass so the ramp crew could go back to work without getting fried by lightning. (Not complaining about this policy, just the delay) After a refreshing but short stay in the airport, it was back on to the second airplane for the trip to Detroit. Thanks to a mechanical issue, we sat around another hour, deplaned for fifteen minutes, reboarded, and took off extremely late for Michigan.

I was happy (as happy as anybody can be after landing in Detroit) to finally be on the ground at my destination and wearing a clean shirt. Even though I was an hour or two late, there was still not enough time for Northworst to get my luggage to the airport. It seemed that their excellent skilz in baggage checking had made my bag miss the first plane. I was informed that there was a good chance the suitcase would arrive on the next flight. Normally this would have been well over an hour sitting around the terminal, but the lateness of my flight brought the wait down to about thirty minutes or so. Sure enough, the bag made it.

Local time had now drifted to around midnight as I set off to find my rental car. I walked to the shuttle bus stop and waited a few minutes before the Hertz bus pulled over and advised me that my rental car company was closed for the night. Again, WTF! I rode the Hertz bus to their lot, looked accross the street at Thrifty/Dollar/whatever it was, confirmed that they were closed, and then rented a Hertz vehicle. It seems to me that a rental car company at a large international airport should be open 24/7. I guess that concept escapes some of the rental car businesses. The drive to my hotel and check-in went well, but it was around 2 am local time before I finally managed to get to sleep.

The return trip was mostly free of issues until I arrived in Las Vegas. The flights were on time and my luggage arrived on my flight. I thought that the curse had been lifted until I arrived at my car and found the left rear tire flat with a ***** through the sidewall. In addition, the mini spare had no air. F*ck! I think it was around 10 pm Nevada time and I was stuck with a flat two hours from home.

I called the airport parking assistance and they filled my spare and waited around to make sure all went will with the tire change. I stopped briefly at a gas station to bring the spare up to the rated psi and then started the long journey home. There are warnings against driving far or over a certain speed on the spares. If I had followed them I would have been stuck in Vegas until I could find a tire shop. Instead, I limped along at a pace faster than the tire warning allowed, but slow enough to irritate anybody caught behind me. <sorry> It seemed that the tire was over-designed because it survived not only the long drive at higher speeds, but also hitting the mud and rocks that had washed across the road during a recent storm. Sometimes the debris was not visible until the last moment, so I hit a few patches at speed. Yikes! It was again early am before I made it to my destination. I can't think of many times I was more relieved to have made it home.

Yeah, the flight was okay but the trip kind of sucked.

I just picture a totally fúcked up looking, pie-eyed, tripping guy, looking at this poor woman with the most serious bug-eyed, redfaced intensity and asking her waht is wrong with her baby


finish!! the fúcking story man!! What about those glands!!!!?


Edited, Sep 20th 2006 at 3:03pm EDT by Kelvyquayo

That is h-o-t-t hawt.