So my lovely and talented wife Aries28 and I were heading to Lawton, Oklahoma last week, to see our 17-year-old graduate from basic training at Fort Sill. Our flight was leaving Birmingham at 2:35, heading to Dallas, where we’d catch another flight to Oklahoma City. We were going to rent a car there and get to Lawton around 9 p.m.
It didn’t work out that way.
We got to the airport in plenty of time; we settled in at the gate around 1 p.m. We’re reading, and talking, and in general congratulating ourselves on getting to the airport early so we didn’t have to dash through the concourse like O.J. Simpson in those old Hertz ads. I should’ve known that this was just tempting the travel gods.
About ten minutes before our flight was supposed to start boarding, Kristin noticed that the electronic sign near the boarding area, which had been displaying our departure time (2:35) on a regular basis, now said “Flight 916: Delayed.” Hmm, we thought. That’s frustrating, but not a major issue; we had a layover in Dallas of about two hours anyway. Not a huge deal. Then, about 20 minutes later, the sign changed. It now said “Flight 916: Departs 3:15.” Okay. That’ll work. Our layover will only be 80 minutes instead of 120. No problem, we thought.
If we were at the beach, instead of sitting at a concourse gate, this would have been the moment that the theme music from the famous documentary film “Jaws” started playing in the background. You know how, when you’re watching that movie, and the theme music starts (Duuuuuh dum. Duuuuuh dum. DumDumDumDum), you yell at the people who are swimming: “Get out of the water! Can’t you hear the music?” If you were watching our life at that moment, you would have been screaming “Give up now! Just drive to Oklahoma! It’ll be faster!”
What happened was the sign, which was as fickle as a politician in an election year, kept changing the departure time. Over the next 10 minutes, it went from 3:15, to 3:45, to 4:10. At that point I got up to ask the airline person at the desk what was going on. “Mechanical trouble!” she chirped cheerfully. “Here’s a flight voucher for your trouble.” While getting a discount on a future flight was nice, I was more concerned with the current flight – specifically, when it would actually take off, and how bad the “mechanical trouble” was. Call me a stickler for safety, but I prefer my flights to land where they’re supposed to, not scattered over a field 100 miles from the airport. I also explained the importance of us arriving in Oklahoma City that night, because graduation from basic training was the next day, and the Army has these silly rules about not rescheduling events like that.
The agent did some poking around on her computer for a while, and then called us back up to the desk. The Dallas flight was going to leave at 5:15 (unless the sign changed its mind again), but she had transferred us to a flight going to Houston, on the theory that both Dallas and Houston were further west than Birmingham, or something. She said the Houston flight would actually get us to Oklahoma City faster than the Dallas flight, even though it left Birmingham two hours later, because the connection was better. Like good little sheep, we said okay.
So we watched the folks troop onto the Dallas flight at 5:15 and fly away. It seemed a little weird to us that we would get to Oklahoma City sooner by taking a later flight, but what did we know? We’re just stupid travelers; the gate agent was an airline professional.
Well. We finally get on the Houston flight and take off, and we’re relaxing with our reading materials and such when the pilot comes on the intercom and gives his little pilot speech about the expected weather in Houston and our cruising altitude and whatnot. Then he says “We should arrive in Houston at 9:25.” Aries28 looks at me. “That can’t be right. Our connecting flight from Houston to Oklahoma City leaves at 8:55.” She gets out our boarding passes, and sure enough, it says 8:55. So we call the flight attendant over, and explain to her that she needs to talk to the pilot, because he forgot to set his clock to Central Time, or something. She checks with the pilot, and checks her handy-dandy flight tracker, and tells us nope, we arrive at 9:25, and our connecting flight leaves 30 minutes before that. I say to her, “I don’t know if you realize this, but that’s a problem.” While Houston is much closer to Lawton, Oklahoma than Birmingham is, it’s not really that close. On a map, Houston and Lawton are only three or four inches apart, but maps can lie.
Anyway, Aries28 calmly began to rip the wing off our airplane in frustration while the flight attendant and the pilot got on the radio to try to solve the problem. And I will say this: The pilot might not have been able to tell time, but he did help us out. They transferred us off the flight to Oklahoma City (which, since it was already in the air, was probably a good thing) and got us on a flight to Dallas, because on the map Dallas was only an inch and a half from Lawton, waaaay closer than Houston.
So we landed in Houston and ran to the gate to board the plane for Dallas … which, if you recall, was where we were heading when this whole mess started. And also which, incidentally, is where we would have been at 7:30 – in plenty of time to make the 8:55 to Oklahoma City – if the gate agent in Birmingham hadn’t helpfully put us on the flight to Houston. Anyway, we got to Dallas at 11 p.m., and were able to rent a car to drive to Lawton, Oklahoma, for only three times the price we would have paid to rent the same car in Oklahoma City. I was a bit concerned that I wouldn’t be able to stay awake for the drive, since we’d been up for about 18 hours at that point, but fortunately the city of Dallas had anticipated that possibility and made the first hour of the car trip as exciting as possible by tearing up every single road we took and putting flashing lights and orange cones everywhere. I don’t know who has the orange-road-cone concession in the Greater Dallas / Fort Worth Metroplex, but that’s one rich person, let me tell you.
On the flip side, once we got out of Dallas, we were driving through a whole lot of nothing. It was 1 a.m., so it’s not like we were going to see much anyway, but there’s a reason knowledgeable travelers refer to parts of Texas and Oklahoma as “sort of like Kansas, but not as exciting.”
We finally got to our hotel at 2:30, a mere six hours behind schedule, and only 22 hours after we’d gotten up the previous morning. And of course, when we stumbled to our room, the magnetic card keys didn’t work, and I had to go back to the front desk and have them re-programmed.
The trip had a happy ending – our 17-year-old son graduated from basic training, and we got to see him, and he’s back home with us now starting his senior year of high school, and the airline is refunding our tickets for the Dallas/Houston/Dallas/Lawton trip. So all’s well that ends well.
Although now that I think about it, I may have forgotten to return the rental car.