Long Island, NY

On Saturday, we head for the airport in the late morning for a 3 PM flight home. Storms have set in and it is difficult to see the road in front of us!

We get the info on the way to the airport that our flight has been delayed 36 minutes. That’s okay, we’ll have more time for a bite to eat in the airport and our connection in Atlanta is several hours so that won’t cause any problems. We turn in the rental car and shuttle to the airport. Upon walking into La Guardia and finding a Departures Board, we see our flight has been cancelled.

Hmm, what to do now? We see huge lines at all the help counters but as we’re walking, we see a Priority Help Desk with no one in line. So we walk up, expecting them to tell us they can’t help us as we are not Priority. But they DO help us! They tell us there are no flights to LAX from La Guardia today, but there IS a direct flight out of JFK! They book us on an 8:20 PM flight but tell us we have to get our seat assignments there. So we get a cab to JFK. The weather is horrid. What should be a 20 minute cross town ride turns into 90 minutes. But we get there and check in just in time to see a rainbow!

We get a meal as we have plenty of time now. It is barely 3PM and our flight is at 8:20PM. We can’t get our seat assignments until an hour before the flight but, at least, we have a flight. We check the Boards and see that there are 5PM, 6PM and 8:20PM flights to LAX. The 5PM is marked ‘CANCELLED’. An hour later the 6PM is CANCELLED. I wipe my brow. The 8:20PM is still marked, ‘ON-TIME’. It is now 7:00PM and the Boards say our flight is Delayed until 10:45PM. This is getting worrisome. 8:00PM and the flight is Delayed to 12:30AM.

10:00PM and the flight is again Delayed to 2:00AM. 11:00PM and the flight is CANCELLED. The Help Desk line is about 200 people long. We are about to check off a Bucket List item no rational person wants to check off. SLEEP IN AN AIRPORT. The cheapest hotel room in the area exceeds $1000 per night. Elee stands in the Help Line. I go in search of a place to lay our heads. If you are going to spend the night in an airport, make sure it’s JFK. It seems that every Gate had 6-10 “Lounge” Seats where you can’t really sleep but you can lay back and close your eyes!

I walk almost a mile through plus or minus 25 Gates before I find two Lounge Seats together. I put our stuff on one seat and lay back in the other.

We catnap through the night restlessly. One cannot actually fall asleep in these seats for very long. When morning finally comes, Elee heads back to the Customer Service queue to find the line horendously long. They had given her a number and rang her phone to inform her it was her time. But it turns out they had opened the queue to everybody with disregard for their number system. Needless to say, the frustration levels were off the charts! They finally tell us they can’t fly us home until Tuesday due to lack of pilots! It is Sunday now!

So we decide to leave the airport and travel via train to Chicago which costs us the price of a New York Hotel for one night. We take a train across NYC to Jamaica Plains where we change to a train to Penn Station and then another train to Newark, NJ Penn Station. It is the day of the Final World Cup Game which is happening in Newark, so the atmosphere is exciting with fans from both Argentina and Spain dressed in their favorite Teams garb and singing and chanting anthems! That is, at the least, some consolation from the frustration!

From there we board an Amtrak to Chicago via Washington, DC. Thanks to modern technology, I manage to stream the World Cup Game to my laptop and we watch the Game on the train! We spend the next night sleeping on the train between DC and Chicago! Slightly more comfortable than the airport but barely. We are traveling through Amish Country as evidenced by some of the people on and off the trains!

By the time we reach Chicago, we have booked a hotel room for a reasonable $160. We ride one more train from Chicago’s Grand Central to O’Hare International Airport where we get a free shuttle to the hotel. We do have time along the way for a famous Chicago Deep Dish Pizza! I even come across the opportunity to photograph my usual pair of lovers! (As those who know me, understand!) We have a promise of a flight home on Tuesday (the same as offered from NYC but without the $1000+ per night for hotels in NYC) I don’t know if this is the most comfortable bed I have ever slept in but after 2 nights in airports and trains, it sure is nice!

The flight from Chicago is on time and stress free. Our hotel was directly under the Chicago landing path, yet the room was quiet! We arrive in LAX on time and get a shuttle to our parking garage where we get in our car and drive home. What a trip! Upon landing in LAX, we even spot an unmarked 747 which is very unusual!

See you all for our next adventure!