Listening just now to NPR, where someone mentioned they saw an “old couple” sleeping on tables in the Denver airport’s Burger King. No pillows or blankets.
What’s going on out there? Are the hotels and motels full? Or do people not want to leave the airport because they’re afraid they’ll miss their chance at a flight?
I feel so bad for those people!
If you strand a metric buttload of people in Denver due to a blizzard, there are a)not going to be enough hotel/motel rooms for all of them, b)some people are not going to be able to afford hotel rooms, and c)people are going to want to be there if any flights get out. Not a happy thought, but shit happens.
It took me 27 hours to get from Boston to San Francisco in August, on the day when everyone went batshit about toothpaste. I was sick, cold, and tired. And when I got to Seattle at midnight, I had missed the last connection to the Bay Area. The next on was at 6am.
So my first option was to wander around a city I’d never been in, check into a hotel, spend another ~$100, sleep for like 3 hours, pack back up, get back to the airport, go through security, and then hope the plane showed up.
My second option was to pull out the iPod and lie down.
That was an easy decision for me.
The hotels and motels throughout Denver are not full, but those near the airport are (reportedly).
One problem: the airport is a long way from Denver via I-70 and Pena Blvd. (which goes from I-70 to the airport) and Pena Blvd. was closed. So there wasn’t any practical way to get a lot of people out of the airport for awhile. Then there was a convoy of buses–the report I saw said 10 of them, with 80 passengers per bus–that took people who had confirmed hotel reservations to their hotels (downtown I think).
A friend of mine called me from her plane on the tarmac on Weds. She was heading out to take the last 5 days of her time-share in Cabo and her plane had been sitting there for a couple of hours. People were still not supposed to use their cellphones but they were–to call the Denver media and report that they had been sitting on the tarmac for three hours.
In other words, they knew the flights weren’t going anywhere, and they couldn’t even get the planes back from the runway to the concourse, never mind transporting stranded passengers to hotels.
(Things are better today. I am taking a break from digging my car out. Two hours so far.)
Not only that, but there was no way in hell those people were getting from the terminal and concourses back out to the hotels, which are all at least a couple miles away. The wind was so bad and it was snowing so hard that at points it was snowing sideways. I heard stories about people that got on planes in the morning and were stuck on the taxiways because of the weather for 8 hours because it was too windy and snowy for the planes to move back to the jetways.
Andrew
You know, this would never have happened in New York. In NYC, the *second * it starts to rain, street vendors are out selling umbrellas for $5. Think how much some entrepreneur could have made selling pillows and blankies at the Denver airport?
Where’s the entrepreneur spirit in America?
P.S. Poor bastards.
Ya wanna talk poor bastards?
My brother landed in Denver Tuesday night before the storm.
He missed his connection. Flight in was landing as flight out was scheduled to take off.
He got scheduled for a flight at 7:20AM the next day. He decided to just stay at the airport instead of going to a hotel.
Then the snow storm from hell came.
SCREWED! He got stuck there for the next two and a half days in the airport. I hope he got home today. The airline at one point told him they could definitely get him on a flight on Christmas Day. Yep, coulda been stuck in the airport for almost a week.
All because he missed his connection.
Sorry to hear about your brother, niblet.
And this is Planes, Trains and Automobiles for real. People are doing just that: buddying up on motel rooms and rental cars. If you remember, when Del first offered to let Neal share his motel room, Neal hesitated, then spotted a guy sacked out on the floor, and accepted. But even that is not as bad as being stuck in the plane.