Travel Disasters - tell us your tales of woe

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Here’s a more recent travel story…

Back in February 2010, we were supposed to go to Walt Disney World for three days, followed by a Disney cruise.

However, the day before our flight, the northeast was hit by a huge snowstorm. Our flight was scheduled for 6 a.m. the morning following the storm, and the online flight status indicated that it was still scheduled to depart on time.

Just be safe, though, I called the airline (Southwest) and after a long wait, found out that our flight was actually cancelled. They also told me the soonest they could get us to Orlando was four days later (after the cruise departed). :frowning:

After looking at every other flight option myself (including on other airlines), I decided we had no choice but to drive, so I booked a one-way car rental to Orlando. At about 2 a.m., I checked on our flight again, and it was still showing “on time,” so I called Southwest again.

This agent confirmed that our flight was indeed cancelled, and that the soonest we could get out of any airport in New England was Monday (four days away). I replied that we’d be driving then. At that, she put me on hold again, and said that she might be able to reduce the drive. After a few minutes, she asked me if we could be in Norfolk, Virginia by 6 p.m. later that same day. “Absolutely!,” I replied.

She told me that she was going to have to get special permission from a supervisor for this (because Norfolk was out of the area), but it made complete sense to her, so she was going to push for it until she got the approval. After 15 minutes or so, she came and told me that the fifth time was the charm. :wink:

So at 7 a.m., we drove to the airport in Connecticut, parked, and picked up a rental car (from National). They were fantastic. They changed our booking to a one-way rental to Norfolk, and told us that if we didn’t make the flight, to just call them and they’d switch it back to a one-way rental to Orlando.

We stopped twice – once for coffee and once for gas. We made it to Norfolk by 4 p.m., turned the car in, and made the flight with plenty of time to spare. All in all, we only lost 12 hours of our vacation, instead of missing it all, and our travel insurance covered the rental car. :slight_smile:

22

In one of my worst travel stories, I wasn’t the traveler, but I was the one to face the consequences.

March 25, 2000. It was a nearly normal evening in Jakarta and my husband and I were putting our two-year-old son to bed. I was fretting a bit, because my mother was scheduled to arrive in almost precisely 24 hours, and I still had a lot of preparation to do even though I was sleepy. (My mother was a bitch on wheels, and gleefully siezed every minor deviation from perfection as an excuse to harass me, so I wanted to make things as perfect as I could before she arrived.)

The phone rang and my husband answered it, then came to me in puzzlement. “It’s your mother - she’s at the airport wondering where the hell we are.”

To say I froze in horror would be an understatement. I ran out the door as fast as I could to get to the airport, stopping only long enough to double-check the email in which my mother had provided her arrival date. Yup … she SAID she was arriving on the 26th.

It was an unhappy hour-long ride to the airport, but the ride home was even worse. My mother was nearly silent, boiling over with fury that I knew she would unleash regularly over the coming weeks of her visit. She finally spoke. “This is unreal. I sent you my dates. I can’t believe you were so careless and thoughtless that you screwed this up, leaving a vulnerable old lady alone at the airport.”

I responded weakly, “But…your email said you would arrive on the 26th. I re-checked before we left, and that’s definitely what you said.”

“Well, yeah. This IS the 26th,” intoned my mother coldly.

Well, no…as we explained, it was the 25th. My mother was shocked to hear this, but thankfully she did then realize it wasn’t my fault I was not waiting for her at the airport.

It turns out that her ticket on Korean Air had her flying through Seoul and spending the night there, courtesy of the airline. She didn’t notice that the overnight was part of her ticket, and when she arrived in Seoul she went straight to the counter to get a boarding pass for her flight to Jakarta. In those pre-September 11 days when air travel could be much more spontaneous, they apparently didn’t care that she’d decided to leave 24 hours early, and they put her on the same flight one day earlier without saying anything.

The story became a family favorite in the years that followed. My mother took great delight in knowing how I’d nearly pissed my pants thinking I’d screwed up meeting her at the airport. She knew how terrified I was of her, and thought it was hysterical. It was…sort of.

23

Very long story so I’ll try to keep it brief. Booked a flight from D.C. to Milan last August, change planes in Toronto. Weather made the first flight late, we arrived in Toronto at 11:00 PM, missing our connection. Weather wasn’t the airline’s fault so they weren’t required to do shit to help us (thanks Air Canada). We got on the phone to book a hotel for the night (next flight would be the following evening). First hotel was fully booked. Second hotel. And an hour later, the 23rd hotel was fully booked. Everything within miles of Toronto was booked because we had stumbled into Caribana, a massive festival to celebrate Caribbean culture. Well, I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend 24 hours in an airport, sleeping on the floor. Thanks to some help from a relative who knew somebody, we found a hotel an hour’s drive from the airport, had to rent a car. Got to bed about 3 AM. Made the flight the next night.

To add insult to injury the hotel still charged us for 14 nights even though I had called as soon as I realized we would be a day late.

24

On a Patriot Guard run from 30 miles south of Prescott AZ to Havasu City. That’s about 250 miles, in the end of August. It was HOT and where we were going it was going to be 20 degrees higher. The only reason to do this was to serve as escort to the first Arizona Army guy killed in the sandbox. When we started, there were 48 bikes and more joined us on the trip.

When we all met up at first, our leader’s road name was Fubar. (Even then, I thought it was not an auspicious omen…but as it happened, none of what followed was his fault.)

As Fubar was coming out of the gas station he cut his hand on the door somehow. Blood dripping, a cut that looked like it could use more than a few stitches and a bunch of bikers. I happen to know that the store sold rubbing alcohol, but someone bought a shot of whisky to clean the wound, which was then closed with ductape butterfly things and glue. Then it was bound with a strip torn off a bandana, and he was good to go.

Only 15 minutes late, we were off. At our first stop, it was hot enough that the blacktop parking lot was soft and one of the big bikes just up and fell over. At our second stop, 2 of them fell over.

Doing 70 on the interstate, one of the bikes in the middle blew out the front tire. The rider kept it up, but had a few very busy moments.

By the time we had gotten to Havasu it was hot enough to melt concrete, there were over a hundred bikes and the staging area wasn’t really big enough so the bikes were packed in. Suddenly, one of the big bikes in the middle started wobbling. People can really scramble when they are motivated, so disaster was averted.

The funeral procession was amazing, cops stopped traffic for the mile long procession, and people were standing out in the sun to wave flags or salute. Very solemn and respectful.

During the grave site ceremony, we stood quietly around holding flags while a uniformed Army bugler was witnessed fiddling around with something (probably a battery cover, I wasn’t close enough to see) on his bugle. (What, did you think those guys playing perfect taps at funerals did it themselves?) As he was doing that, the family was all focused on the minister but we all kinda moved over to block their view anyhow.

As the casket was being lowered into the grave, something happened with the pulley things and the back end got dropped.

Gasps and a second of silence before the family started laughing and talking about how he always was a joker and that he was probably laughing down at us.

We split off with a couple of friends so I didn’t witness any of the things that happened on the ride back, but I heard that it was epic.

25

This is the story of my first trip to Europe–or rather, my return. Pour yourself a fresh beverage, settle back, and relax. This may take a while.

It was a business trip to Sweden. You can tell it wasn’t a pleasure trip, because…it was to Sweden, in February. I had been there for several weeks, and it was nearly time to go home. Unfortunately, the day before my departure, I slipped on snow on the outside staircase at the hotel and broke my tailbone. There wasn’t really anything to be done about it, and I really wanted to go home, so I departed as planned.

That was not as simple as it sounds. My work site was not exactly in the most cosmopolitan part of the country. Consequently, my journey began around dawn the next day, at a bus stop. The bus would carry me several hours to the town where the rail ended…only, we couldn’t start. Slush from the roads had coated the sides of the bus, freezing the luggage compartment shut. People were milling around, the driver was tugging futilely on the hatch, and I wanted to go home. I finally dug a screwdriver out of a toolkit in my luggage and loaned it to him, so he could chip away the ice. We were only a little late. As I perched my broken ass gingerly on a bus seat, I allowed myself a little pat on the back for helping get things back on track. Little did I know.

A few hours later, I transferred to my train, and settled down to chat with a nice German couple. Physical discomfort aside, all seemed well, until we pulled into a station near the Denmark border, and the crew got off and disappeared. The Germans and I looked at each other, then at the assorted Swedes around us, who seemed equally puzzled and were looking at a little scrolling sign for clues. About an hour later, another train pulled up on a parallel track, and the Swedes pointed at a new announcement on the sign, which seemed to cause them some consternation. The Germans and I had no idea what was going on, but we followed suit when the Swedes gathered up their bags and trooped across the tracks to the new train…for the 15-minute ride into Copenhagen.

Well, vanishing train crew, whatever. I had reached the airport! I was practically home, right? In fairness, Copenhagen airport was pretty nice, for an airport, and reasonably efficient. I had a few hours to kill, which was mostly spent on completing the shopping list a bunch of ex-pat friends had sent with me. Then I departed on time. For a transatlantic flight. On hard airplane seats, with a broken ass.

The only way to sit that wasn’t actively painful was leaning forward, with my forehead against the seat back in front of me…which brings me to the in-flight entertainment system. It was a fairly neat one for the time, except that mine was broken. It was stuck on a single channel, and I couldn’t turn it off. Prior to that, I didn’t even know that planes had belly cams.

(Did I mention that I’m afraid of flying? Now I was nursing a phobia and a broken ass.)

So, for about 9 hours, I mostly kept my eyes shut, because every time I opened them, I was basically looking 30,000 feet straight down. Eventually, we touched down in Chicago. I had been traveling for about 17 hours–tiring under normal circumstances, grueling with a broken bone. Still, I was about to start the last leg of the trip, and the flight would only be a couple of hours long. I hurried to my gate, which turned out to be unnecessary. Very unnecessary, because the flight crew for my flight…was missing. The gate agents couldn’t find them. Not at the gate. Not in the airport. Not answering phones. Probably not anything sinister. Just a scheduling glitch, you know. No big deal, really, except that there was no one to substitute for them.

I couldn’t sit down anymore at that point. I was too sore. I wanted to lie down, but lying on an airport floor seemed likely to end in trampling. I couldn’t go find a more comfortable place to wait, because the gate agents kept telling us to stick close, they’d get a crew any minute now. There were these weird columns made of three close-set pipes. I ended up wedging my arm through one of them, with the strap of my bag hooked over my shoulder, and half-dozed on my feet. Turns out that “any minute now” is about four and a half hours.

I staggered onto the plane, tired enough that I forgot, for a crucial moment, that I had a broken ass. Regrettably, that moment was when I dropped into my seat, and I was forcibly reminded. I spent the flight doubled over my seat belt, trying very hard to levitate. It was a very long two hours, but we eventually touched down at DFW.

Which was…creepy. It was in the wee hours of Sunday morning, and I’d never seen it empty before. Echoingly empty. Zombie apocalypse vibes were had. They gave way to disbelief in the face of a locked door, however. The luggage claim area was closed off, untended. We could see the carousel lurch to life, our bags whirling around and around in splendid isolation. Several people just leaned their foreheads against the plexi wall and watched them. One lady sat down on the floor and cried. A few of us sort of formed up and started wandering around (slowly and limpingly, in my case), looking for a security guard. We finally found one, and he rousted out someone who could open the door.

Then it was a long wait in the cold as someone found a taxi company with enough cars running to handle all the passengers. I kind of flopped across a seat and mumbled my address, and the driver–blessings upon him–managed to correctly interpret my garble and get me home. I actually crawled up the steps to my apartment.
tl;dr recap: Frozen bus. Vanishing train crew. Aviophobe stuck looking straight down from a plane for hours. Missing flight crew. Airport straight out of The Langoliers. Broken ass.

And I hear some people love to travel.

26

Went to a concert in Philadelphia, about six/seven hour drive from Ohio. Oh the way there the directions my friend had printed out became directions as if we had started out in New Jersey. After about an hour or so of driving around in New Jersey, we made it to the concert only to find out it had been canceled a week before. Wt turn around and drive home.

27

I traveled extensively in China in the 1980’s. I’m not sure my worst story, but these weren’t really travel disasters as I never really had a deadline.

Once, I went all out and splurged $50 for a plane ticket that would save me 3 days travel from bumfuck China in a “hard sleeper” train to Hong Kong, with the train costing maybe $10 back then. Stuck in the airport for about 60 hours (2 overnights) with no explanation except mysterious “weather” somehow involved so they wouldn’t have to put us in a hotel. Clear skies both in Kunming and in Hong Kong. Near riot the second night with the Hong Kong folks trying to punch the officials that claimed it was bad weather in Hong Kong that was delaying the flights.

Got off a bus in seriously bum fuck nowhere Tibetan borderland. Police immediately grabbed us two foreigners and ordered us back to the closest provincial capital city, which at that time was 5 days away by bus. Only one problem, the bus that brought us had left, and the next bus was 7 days away. So, we were kinda under house arrest in the village waiting for our bus. The local Tibetans explained that we could be numbnuts but what they would do is hitch a ride to the literal end of the road, traverse the river with a zipline since there was no bridge, then hike two days to the provincial border, get a boat across to the neighboring border, and then all would be kosher. Back then it was Provincial rivalry and lack of any kind of communication. We were not about to let down our country or our race and spread rumors amongst the Tibetan population that we were a buncha numbnuts, now could we? Basically, we did the 2 day hike, with some adventures along the way like nearly getting caught up in a new road being blasted out of the mountainside (knocked me to my knees, and rock and dust from the nearby blast pelted us for a really long time), and when we finally did cross the provincial border, then were promptly arrested and sent to this new provincial border (which was where we were aiming to go in order to take a couple days bus and a 3 day train back to HK to meet up for Christmas with some buddies coming out). Ahhhhh, those were the days.

Versus the more mundane that a good number of flights in China after the first flight start getting backed up and delayed for ungodly amounts of time.

28

Wow – rackin’ up those provincial border arrests. I’ll think of you the next time I waltz across, say, the Manitoba-Ontario line.

29

My story does not have any provincial police.

I went to Denver for a business meeting in October of 1997. For some strange reason, perhaps because the weather reports were calling for some snow, I rented a 4WD Jeep instead of my usual intermediate car.

The meeting went fine and I got up the next day and started to drive to Denver International from downtown via I-70. It began to snow heavily and things were pretty treacherous. When I got to the Pena Blvd. exit (forgive the absence of the tilde), there were several police cars and emergency vehicles to make everyone turn around and go back. Pena Blvd. was closed to all traffic, as was the airport itself.

I was able to get back to the previous exit and pull off at a hotel. The hotel was still serving brunch and had actually agreed to keep serving beyond the normal time because so many travelers had been forced off the roads. I stayed there for nearly ten hours. Of course, they were completely full and I couldn’t get a room.

Now, this was before smartphones. I had a cellphone and that was basically the only link I had to find out what was going on. Fortunately, I had booked the trip through my company’s travel agent. At about 11:00P, they were able to find me the last room in a Microtel about ten miles away. I put the Jeep in 4WD and took off.

Don’t know if you’ve ever stayed in a Microtel, but I could touch both walls as I was lying in bed. No food except vending machines. All nearby restaurants closed. Worse yet, I could only have the room for one night.

The next day I sat in the jeep for about six hours before the travel agent found me another room about six miles away. The airport was still closed. I headed for the new motel.

The next day, I was able to get to the airport and get on standby. I stayed there for the whole day, but no joy. Fortunately, the travel agent had booked the hotel for TWO nights, so I only had to drive back about 15 miles for yet another night in Denver.

Back at the airport bright and early, I was lucky to get put on a flight headed in the general direction of home. I think I got to Philadelphia via Chicago and Cleveland, which at least got me on the right coast. Half-a-day later, I was in my own house.

Due to travel insurance, which was required by my company, we didn’t pay anything extra at all for my extended “vacation” in the Mile-High City.

30

Not disastrous per se, but more miserable, and with an anecdote I like to share. I rode my motorcycle across Wyoming in the rain. I was ill prepared and soaked to the bone. I pulled into a scenic outlook place to see a waterfall across the valley. A car pulled up next to me with a couple of guys. The passenger gave me kind of a dirty look, and I said to myself, “there’s something wrong with that guy”. Sure enough, he got out and he only had one hand. True story.

31

“Splendid isolation” is a really cool turn of phrase. This whole paragraph made me laugh. Ah, what insult to injury for you after everything else, to finally arrive at your destination and not be able to claim your stuff!
:slight_smile:

32

Did you find the hook hanging off the back of your motorcycle after you got home?

33

Approximately 1995, flying from Austin, Texas, to Alberta, Canada as an unaccompanied 13 year old. Mom traveled a lot for her job, so I’d make the trip to visit her wherever she was at the time. I was pretty comfortable flying alone.

Returning from one such visit, the second leg of my trip had been cancelled with no immediate indication of what was going to happen. Never had a flight cancelled, but I had a vague idea that you usually got vouchers for hotels and food. I was not looking forward to having to check into a hotel room, or navigate the cancellation dance in general, as a 13 year old with no credit card and probably less than $20 in my pocket.

Fortunately I noticed another flight in the same terminal that was going to my final destination, with one intermediate stop. I gave my paper boarding pass for the cancelled flight to the gate agent, and walked past confidently with my seat stub in hand. I hope it was at least the same airline as my original booking, I don’t remember any more.
I was one of the last people to board, and had my pick of seats on a half empty flight (remember those?!). I stalled on choosing a seat, futzing with my carry on with the intention of waiting until everyone was finally situated. I was worried that sitting in another passenger’s seat would attract scrutiny and blow the scheme open.

We landed at the intermediate stop, and the people who remained on the flight to the final destination were asked to produce a boarding pass for the second leg. I pretended to do the old pocket pat-down and played the part of a confused 13 year old. “Ms. Flight Attendant, I can’t find my boarding pass, but I’m sure I need to be in XXXXX!” That was sufficient for them and I remained in my seat.

After deplaning in my home airport, I was walking through the terminal on my way to a payphone to call Dad to come pick me up. I’m surprised to see him already at the airport, walking towards me from the other end of the terminal. Clearly agitated, but ecstatic to see me.
Before leaving home to pick me up from the scheduled flight, Dad called the airline’s flight status phone number to ensure that my flight was on time. Hearing that it was cancelled, he demanded to know where his underage son was and wanted to know that I was safe. After being told by a representative that the airline simply had no idea where I was, he responded like a panicked parent and drove to our home airport to (in his words) “start punching out bag handlers until someone told me where you were.”

34

Oh, there are a few…

An unaccompanied minor story to piggyback onto **Whiskey Dickens’**s account.

My kids, ages about 8 and 10, fly from our nearby airport in NY state to spend a few days with their grandparents. Two flights each way, both times switching planes in Philadelphia.

The flight out is uneventful. The flight back–they get to the airport on Thursday late afternoon with my dad, only to be told that the flight is cancelled. There is one later flight, but the kids aren;t allowed on it. Apparently the airline rules say that UMs can’t take the last flight of the day to a destination where there is a plane switch. Makes some sense, though I’d never heard of such a thing. But if the flight arrives too late in Philadelphia to put the kids on the plane bound for home, then they are stuck with a couple of kids overnight–not a situation anyone wants.

Okay. Dad takes the kids home. They are now scheduled for a 7 am flight on Friday, through Philadelphia again. It’s going to mean a very early morning for the kids and for my parents…but all should be well. Except that, when Mom and the kids arrive at the airport bright and early, that flight has been cancelled too. They wait for futher instructions for a couple of hours, then Mom has to leave (!)–she has a work obligation she can’t get out of–so Dad has to come down to the airport and wait with them. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

Why is it taking so long? Turns out that the main holdup is that the small planes between Phila and here are solidly booked. Getting the kids to Phila is not a problem, but getting them here…is. I call; the agent says they could put the kids on a flight NOW for Phila, but no guarantee they’d be able to get from there to here, so no go. I look at the clock, do some calculations. I could drive there in 3 hours if I went real fast and didn’t hit traffic. Maybe that’s the best bet? No, they say they won’t do that. The kids are ticketed to Local Airport and they can’t change that, canb’t release them to my custody at any airport other than that one. Argh.

The airpline people finally find a flight for DC that leaves in an hour, and a connection there that will take them here, but the trouble is that there isn;t a lot of time to make the connection…Well, I don;t feel I can impose on my folks any more and anyway I’m sure it will all work out. I give the okay. The kids become part of the system. I thank Dad very much and he waits till the kids disappear out of sight and then beats it for his own work obligation.

Okay! Home stretch! Only we are keeping track of the flight as best we can, and, yes, it’s late taking off, quite a bit late, and it doesn;t make up time in the air, and when it lands–the second plane has already left. The next plane to here is six hours from now.

Where are the kids? we ask the people in DC. Can we talk to them? (Cell phones are not yet widespread, and the kids don’t have one.) Sure, they say, we’ll put you in touch with them, and a long while passes, and then a longer while, and then a longer while yet, and finally somebody comes back to the phone and says no one is really sure where the kids are. “They’re safe,” she added, “and being cared for, but I just can’t find out where.” THEY HAVE MISPLACED MY CHILDREN. HEADS WILL ROLL.

I am all set to drive the six plus hours to DC at this point, but again I am told not to by the agent. “You don;t know where my children are and you;re telling me not to come to DC?” I say. “Then you’d better locate them NOW and call us as soon as you do.” An hour goes by. We call back three times. I am ready to hit the road anyway. Finally, on the fourth call, we are told that they know where the kids are. However, they don;t seem to be able to patch us through to the room where they are being held–being cared for. This is excruciating.

We never did get to talk to the kids, for whatever reason I never understood. But at last the last flight of the day for our airport took off from DC, and the kids were on it. Or so we were told, but I will admit I didn;t believe it till the plane landed and they got off.

(They had actually been just fine, of course. The only complaint was that my son said they never got lunch. Oh dear, we said, did you tell them that you wanted lunch? I tried to, he said, but she–he jerked his thumb at his sister, two years older–told them that we were just fine and didn;t need any food. Sigh.)

Not a fun day.

35

I’m not sure this counts. Flew to the US in the back of the bus with my wife, a 5 year old, and 18 month old twins. The twins tag team cried the entire way. I had one of the twins in a kangaroo pouch and paced in a plane the 14 hours it took to San Francisco. They tag teamed me by crying, bawling and very occaisionally sleeping. I remember the United battle had of an air hostess actually felt sorry for me and slipped me two mini bottle of JD on the sly and for free. There was a bunch of university students from Denver on the flight. They were pretty cool, understanding and we chatted about their China experience (when whatever twin wasn’t too loud).

We changed planes in SF, and when I got on the flight to Denver and seated right in the middle of them. I just kinda laughed and apologized. Thankfully, by then both the twin I had and I was so exhausted we actually slept all the way to Denver, so weren’t the steerage companions from hell.

Not looking for sympathy, but out of a at least a hundred-plus flights across the Pacific, that was one of the worst (for me). I’m sure my neighbors weren’t real thrilled with tag team crying twins either. :slight_smile:

36

I was working in China and had the month of February off, so travelled to Vietnam and Cambodia overland. I stayed in Cambodia a few days too long (beside Beoung Kak Lake before it was filled in) so got a bus along the bumpy road to Saigon, flew to Hanoi and got a bus to Kunming, China, where I was going to get the 16-hour train ride to Wuhan.

It was in the middle of the night and a ferocious lightning storm crashed around us with torrential rain, the bus sliding around on the slippery dirt road that had been cut into the mountain, with nothing to stop it sliding off the side and falling 300 feet into the valley below. Remember I was returning the way I’d came, so chose this option :smack:.

The bus then caught fire up in the mountains around the border with China, so we got out and waited around under some cover. No-one there spoke a word of English so I just did what everyone else did. Another bus turned up and we all got on, it had a different configuration of tiny sleepers so everyone just guessed where they should go.

After a few hours some more people got on, plus some border guards. One started shouting at me in Chinese, obviously I didn’t understand a word of his ranting but got the message when the driver said ‘Ticket’, indicating I was in the wrong ‘bed’. I ended up laying on a piece of wood, resting on a rear wheel arch.

We arrived in Kunming around 16 hours late, and I headed to the train station. I was confused as I got closer the streets became fuller with people sitting on the pavement, with luggage. I turned the corner to where the train station was, and in the square in front of it must’ve been at least 30,000 people sitting/standing around. I didn’t know but I was in the heart of the biggest annual human migration on Earth.

The station’s ticket area had 20 queues, each having at least 100 people patiently queueing in them. I went to a guard and asked what should I do? He beckoned over a female guard who spoke English, and she led me past the 20 lines to the VIP (and dumb foreigner, it seems) line, which had a grand total queue of 2 people. Waiting in it, I could feel 2,000 pairs of eyes burning into the side of my head. Once the ten minutes I waited elapsed and I got to the front, through my manager on my phone translating, I found out when I could next get a train ticket.

Three weeks.

My manager said ‘Fly’, I said ‘Okay but won’t the airlines be busy too?’ but she insisted I try to book a seat on a plane. I went to a cigarette vendor, thinking how many people I’d need to ask before they understood me and gave the correct directions to a travel agent. He understood me and the directions were perfect, it was a 20 minute walk. I asked the agent, thinking it’s going to be at least a week before I can get back to Wuhan.

They asked if I wanted to fly that evening or the next morning.

37

We were flying to Kathmandu to start a trek in the Annupurna region and our flights went from SF->Vancouver->HK->Bangkok->Kathmandu. Typhoon Celia was hitting HK when we arrived and we circled and circled for a few hours before an announcement came over the loudspeakers. It was first in Chinese, then French, and finally English. From the groans of anguish we heard from Chinese and French folks we knew it wasn’t good news. HK was closed and we were diverted to Taipei.

At the airport in Taipei they took our passports, loaded us into buses and told us we weren’t allowed to the leave the hotel since we were just “passengers in transit” and not officially in Taiwan. At the hotel we dropped our stuff in our rooms and came down for dinner and passed a sign saying be ready at 6:00 AM for our flight back to HK. With that we just might make our connecting flight from Bangkok to Kathmandu. When we finished dinner (which was excellent, but I couldn’t really identify any of what we were eating) the sign had been changed to noon. The plane was going to continue to Bangkok, and we were sure we were going to miss our connection to Kathmandu.

When we got to HK they informed us that the plane was going back to Vancouver because it was already so far behind schedule, but they’d put us on a Cathay Pacific flight to Bangkok instead. That flight was lovely but we weren’t met at the gate by the folks from Canadian Airlines to give us the update. We tracked down their office as it was closing and the employee reopened the office and tried to figure out what to do with us.

He quickly tracked down our records, and gave us hotel vouchers, but also said there was no way were flying tomorrow. He said to plan a day in Bangkok and check with the airline tomorrow evening to see if they would have a flight then next day. We enjoyed a day in Bangkok, then checked back in to be told they would probably have a flight for us the next day, but don’t check out of the hotel till we confirm it. We sat in our room until about 10:00 AM when we notified that we had 45 minutes to get to the gate. Off we went, made our flight, and arrived in Kathmandu 2 days late. Fortunately the guest house we were staying at had a van at the airport by happenstance and they took us there and honored our reservation even though were were quite late.

The rest of the trip was great. Except for me being hospitalized for pneumonia at the end while traveling alone on an island in the Gulf of Thailand. But that’s a story for another day.

38

Back in 1998, I was in Houston sometime in the late summer or early Fall. I had flown in early in the week to install some software, and would be flying out back to my home in Kansas City early Friday afternoon since I was attending a weekend seminar on Friday evening.

At this particular client, we had an account rep who was stationed in Houston for the duration of the project, and, apparently, wasn’t representing the company very well. This guy’s manager (I’ll call him “Mike”) flew in for some meetings, and also to have a private conversation with the account rep.

On Thursday, it started to rain a little bit, but it seemed like it was just a summer storm. Then, Mike asked me to join him and the account rep for dinner. He wanted to thank me for a great job and he also wanted to talk to the account rep for a little bit. He mentioned a favorite restaurant but since I didn’t know where it was, he told me to just ride with him in his car, and he would give me a ride back to the office after dinner.

It seemed like a great plan at the time. Two cars instead of three, carpooling, all that great stuff.

When we left the office, the rain was coming down fairly hard, and traffic was jammed all over town. Mike and I were talking about the client and did not have the radio on.

We got to the restaurant and had dinner. After dinner, Mike asked me if I would mind waiting out in the lobby of the restaurant while he and the account rep talked about a few things. I sat in the lobby for about 5 minutes and noticed that they had an umbrella, but they were short-stafffed due to traffic. I asked them if I could borrow the umbrella and that I would bring it back.

For the next hour-and-a-half, I used the umbrella to escort their guests to-and-from their cars. The rain was really coming down, and didn’t show signs of stopping. But, it kept me busy while Mike and the account rep discussed the few minor things that needed correcting. For an hour-and-a-half. (Turns out, the account rep was being told to pack up his stuff and come home that weekend, and that he was essentially fired. Not sure why that took 90 minutes, but, oh well.)

We finally left the restaurant around 9:00 PM, but the rain was coming down so hard and some of the canals and bayous were starting to flood a little. In fact, we had heard from the restaurant staff that the route between the restaurant and the office building was flooded, so Mike suggested we just go to the hotel and I would ride with him in the morning, pick up my car, make one final check on the new software, and then head to the airport.

We got to the hotel and went down to the bar for a drink. That’s when we found out that a tropical storm that they thought was going to veer away from Galveston had suddenly turned into something that was not-quite-a-hurricane, and it was coming ashore and heading straight for Houston. “You mean it wasn’t already here?!?!?” went through my head.

The next morning, I was up around 4:00 AM and watching the news, and it was not good. A lot of Houston was under water because of the surge from the canals and bayous. The area that was most affected was the area around the office building where my car was parked. In the underground parking lot. I called Mike and told him I was starting to think this was pretty serious.

We grabbed a quick bite to eat and left the hotel around 6:00 AM and started heading to the office. The only map we had was from the rental car place, and everything was either blocked, crowded, or flooded. At one point, water was starting to seep into the car from the bottom of the door, and we debated whether we should just turn around and go back to the hotel or keep forging ahead. We decided to forge ahead.

I kept thinking that I was going to find my rental car floating at the top of the garage.

We finally got to the office building around 9:00 AM, even though the drive was less than 10 miles. Much to our surprise, the office building complex was on a slight rise, and the rental car was safe. However, the client had called and had told Mike that the office was shut down because of the flooding.

I got my car and started heading to the airport (George Bush Intercontinental, north of Houston). I got on the freeway and made it about half a mile, happy that there was absolutely no traffic on the freeway. Puzzled, curious, but still happy. Then, I saw the cop car parked in the middle of the freeway with a cop waving the flashlight at me. I pulled up and asked what was going on, and was told that the freeway was closed due to flooding and that I would have to get off right there.

I said, “OK, but how do I get to the airport from here?”

He replied, "I don’t give a $%^&* how you get there, just get off the freeway now!

I started making my way northward as best as I could, and saw at least two cars completely submerged on the freeway.

I finally got to the airport and had to find a gas station to refill the tank. I was actually quite pleased I was only 30 minutes overdue from when I was supposed have returned the rental car.

Then, the rental car dumbcluck tried to charge me an extra day for returning the car late. At that point, I lost it, and started screaming at them. I told them there had been a $%^& hurricane out there and they were lucky to be getting the car back at all and that I had been focused on getting their car back to them since 6:00 AM. I may have possibly raised suspicions about the state-of-marriage of his parents at the time of his birth, but I don’t remember.

His supervisor overheard my ahem oratory and came over to investigate the matter. He agreed that charging me a whole day was a little much given the circumstances, and I finally got to the airport.

Despite the flooding in Houston, the plane took off on time. I did notice, however, that it was a lot less crowded than I was used to.

39

Not mine but my parents’. They wanted to drive the entire length of the ALCAN highway but they only made it about halfway between the border and Dawson Creek when the car slid into a ditch. They got the car fixed but returned home to Arkansas.

They never did make the trip to Alaska.