Razorette and I dodged the Denver Blizzard bullet, but it still took us two days to get to Raleigh-Durham for Christmas with our son (the chef) and his wife.
The drive into Denver wasn’t too bad; we were scheduled for a flight out at 1:20 p.m. Friday. DIA announced they’d be open for flight operations as of noon that day, so all flights scheduled after that would fly. We drove to an outlying lot, shuttled in, checked in through curbside and settled in at the gate for what we thought would be a 5-hour wait (we’d been told to get there early, so we reported at 8 a.m. for a 1:20 flight.) By 10 a.m. they’d moved our flight back to 2:30, but Chicago was rainy and windy, so the connecting flight to Raleigh might be delayed. A half-hour later they moved take-off time to 3:30; our connection in Chicago was out of the question. We booked a room at the Garden Inn Hilton for just over $100 for the night and secured a 7:10 a.m. flight out of Chicago the next day. Despite the hassles, luck was staying with us.
At noon two runways opened, and for the first time in two days aircraft started landing and taking off at DIA. When the first bird went up a little after noon, there was a cheer throughout the concourse. Our flight was delayed again to 4:05, then 5:00. By midafternoon, the delays had stopped.
By five, they had four runways open and were launching and recovering two at a time. At 6 p.m. we pushed back from the gate and within 20 minutes we were in the air.
At Chicago, we got some incorrect information about our luggage and misunderstood when we did get the right info. Turns out, because we’d missed our connecting flight, the luggage was automatically forwarded to the next available flight – the same 7:10 a.m. flight we were now booked on for Saturday. We misunderstood and spent two hours looking for luggage that wasn’t to be looked for. When we finally got it straightened out and got to the hotel, it was nearly midnight. We calculated backward from the 7:10 takeoff time and realized we needed a 4 a.m. wakeup call. We wolfed down some Lean Cuisine from the hotel’s larder and hit the sack.
Four hours later we were back at it. We made the gate in plenty of time, trooped aboard the plane … and sat there for nearly an hour while mechanics tried to make an electrical system respond. No luck. By 8:15 we were being deplaned and marched to another gate. At 9:30 a.m. Saturday, we pushed back from the second gate. A little after noon Saturday – nearly 24 hours late – we finally greeted our kids in the airport at Raleigh-Durham.
And we were damn lucky to even be there. Thousands of people still waited for available seats back in Denver. We met a woman at the Hilton in Chicago who had spent three days waiting in Chicago for a flight into Denver so she could meet her family in Lander, Wyo., for Christmas. We helped a family going to India for the holidays book the hotel room in Chicago; they later walked out because room service wasn’t available at midnight. We heard that Frontier Airlines in Denver called in the police to avert a near riot the day after we finally flew out.
It’s Christmas night, we’ve had a fantastic Christmas with our son (did I mention he’s a chef?) and his wife and her family and friends here in Raleigh, and we plan to spend a few days taking in the sights and doing some serious reading before flying back on Thursday.
Oh, yeah, we just found out there’s a 60% chance of snow in Denver Thursday.