As pretty much everyone knows these days, if you're going to travel by air at some point you will experience a delay. I'll admit that we've been relatively lucky with our travels and have only experienced minor delays (minor being two hours or less) (and yes, to me that's a minor delay considering lots of people are delayed even longer sometimes.) Our flights to Minneapolis, however, can only be described as a debacle. I had been worried all day that something would happen to our flights as it had been raining. We made it to Reagan National Airport with time to spare only to find out that our flight had been delayed about 45 minutes. Then it was delayed another hour. Then they let us get on the plane and we sat on the runway for another hour. By this time Maya was going bonkers and I was about three hairs shy of being completely bald.
Finally, we got in the air but we had a problem. We weren't flying direct to Minneapolis. We had to get a connecting flight in Chicago and at this rate we weren't going to make our connection. We knew that there was bad weather in Chicago at the time so our only hope was that our flight to Minneapolis would be delayed as well. Unfortunately, our flight, though delayed an hour, still took off before we got to Chicago. Now we were in O'Hare airport with no flight at 10 pm with no flights to Minneapolis leaving until the next day. We gave up on standing in line to get a flight at the client services desk so we just called United on our cell phone and got the earliest flight we could to Minneapolis the next day which was still 12 pm putting us there at about 2, a full eighteen hours later than expected. Considering we were only staying for a few days, that was a lot of time to lose.
Our only saving grace was that we were in Chicago which meant that we would be able to stay with our good friends Jen and Steve for the night rather than trying to find a room in a hotel. The next morning we packed up and went back to O'Hare. This time the weather was cooperating and we boarded our flight with no problems. Even better, Maya was invited to sit in the cockpit with the pilots and had a grand time sitting in the captain's chair "piloting" the plane. Seeing her sitting in that seat, thoroughly proud of herself for getting us ready to take off, made all the previous day's delays and hassles totally worth it.
As pretty much everyone knows these days, if you're going to travel by air at some point you will experience a delay. I'll admit that we've been relatively lucky with our travels and have only experienced minor delays (minor being two hours or less) (and yes, to me that's a minor delay considering lots of people are delayed even longer sometimes.) Our flights to Minneapolis, however, can only be described as a debacle. I had been worried all day that something would happen to our flights as it had been raining. We made it to Reagan National Airport with time to spare only to find out that our flight had been delayed about 45 minutes. Then it was delayed another hour. Then they let us get on the plane and we sat on the runway for another hour. By this time Maya was going bonkers and I was about three hairs shy of being completely bald.
