The Trip That Wasn't

I have to add what, I think, is the second in a series of three stories about my attempts to travel this summer (the last part is told here, here, and here).  

My buddy Bino is getting married later this month, and he and his Best Man/brother scheduled the requisite bachelor party.  In Reno.  Why Reno, you ask?  I sure did.  It turns out that the Best Man has a house there.  They said that no one would have to pay for a hotel if everyone crashed at his place.  Unfortunately, my engineering background kicked in, and I had to wonder about that not paying for a hotel thing.  See, about 80% or more of those invited to the bachelor party live in the Washington, DC, area or the Pittsburgh, PA, area.  I looked it up, and those two places are not close to Reno, NV, meaning that those 80+% of invitees would have to buy plane tickets (or go on very long road trips) to make the party, and those plane tickets would likely cost more than hotel rooms closer to home.  That said, I get that sometimes people want to do the bachelor party thing away from home.  So, even though I didn’t have the absolute best and most positive frame of mind about the trip, I knew I’d have fun once I got there, and I signed up to attend.

Getting to Reno from the Washington, DC, area is not all that simple.  I couldn’t find any direct flights from any of the three airports that serve the metro area.  So I had to connect somewhere.  By the time I bought my ticket (which was admittedly after a lot of procrastination, but still more than three weeks away from the travel date), I had to pay a lot of money for a flight that got me in late on Thursday and left at the ass crack of dawn on Sunday.  Even though I didn’t have a great attitude toward the trip, I knew I’d have fun once I got there, and I just sighed and bought the ticket.  

In between buying the ticket and going on the actual trip, I went to San Francisco for a week.  I’ve already detailed some of the pain and suffering that particular trip inflicted, and I’d be dishonest if I wasn’t wary of trying to fly somewhere after that experience.  Still, I figured that this trip had to go more smoothly.  As many, many people have oh-so-helpfully suggested upon hearing about my trip to San Fran, ATL is often a veritable quagmire in the middle of a trip, and this trip did not involve me going anywhere near there.  So I was already better off.  On top of that, my flight was out of National, and things generally run pretty smoothly for me out of there.  Plus, I was connecting through Phoenix, and I don’t even think they have weather there.  Besides, karma owed me after the BWI – OAK debacle.  Right?  Maybe.  Even with all of those things on my side, I didn’t quite have the attitude I’d want to have about the trip ahead of time.  Still, we were going to play golf, and I like that.  I was counting on having fun once I got there.

A couple of days before the trip was to commence, the Best Man sent out an itinerary, which seemed to me to be long on nice/steak dinners and short on golf.  Don’t get me wrong, I like to eat.  That much is obvious to anyone who looks at me.  However, my taste buds just aren’t all that good, really, and I don’t get excited about fancy dinners.  I like good food better than bad, but I don’t seem to appreciate or enjoy it as much as so many people I know do. And since my taste buds aren’t all that good, I generally figure that the fancy dinners are wasting money that could be better spent on golf or gadgets or something of the sort.  Besides, despite the fact that I hail from the Midwest, I don’t particularly like steak.  Yes, I know that makes me weird, dumb, and possibly un-American, but there’s nothing I can do about it.  I don’t hate it or anything, but I pretty much never order it.    So that itinerary didn’t get me excited.  But there was going to be some golf, and we’d do the whole hanging with the guys, drinking, and making fun of yo’ mama sort of thing.  I might not have had a very good attitude about the trip, but I figured I’d have fun once I got there.

On the day of departure, I got my work wrapped up in plenty of time, packed my clothes and golf clubs, and got to the airport right on schedule (which is about 1.25 hours before departure time for me).  There was a bit of a crowd standing around the check-in counter, but I breezed up to the self-service kiosk and checked in.  After a few minutes of waiting, the agent called me up to check my bags.  Before he did that bag-checking thing, though, he told me, “Your flight is delayed.  Right now it’s supposed to get into Phoenix at 7:12.  Your outbound flight is supposed to leave Phoenix at 7:40…  So you should be fine the way things are right now.”  And then he started to go on about the business of putting claim checks on my bags.  

I pondered this development.  I knew the flight was delayed.  It said so right on the video screens that are not 10 feet from the line I was in.  The agent seemed a bit hesitant with his last sentence.  Something seemed not right to me.  I mean, have you ever had a flight get delayed and then have it actually depart at the first time they give you?  Me neither.  Besides, the day in ATL was weighing heavily on me, and who knew what those terrorists had planned for the next day?  So I asked, “Let’s just go waaaaaaaaay out on a limb and assume that the flight is going to be delayed a little more.  Then what happens?”

The ticket agent must have been waiting for this, as he offered to check for other flights for me.  Had he anticipated it, I suppose he could have skipped the dancing part there, but I suppose it was nice of him to tacitly suggest that I ask.  After some keyboard-tapping and head-shaking, he told me they had no other flights to Reno that day.  “Would you like me to check with the other airlines?” he asked.  

“Damn skippy!” I thought, but I only said, “Thank you.  If you think it’s a good idea, that would be nice.”  He checked with those airlines for 5 or 10 minutes so that he could report that there were no seats available on any flight into Reno that day.  Part of me was astounded.  I thought that we have this huge air travel industry, with lots of companies flying planes all over the country.  You can’t swing a mildly wounded hedgehog without hitting a plane, and there are ZERO ways to get me into Reno tonight??!!  But it was only a part of me thinking that.  The majority of me was completely unsurprised by the revelation that there was no other way to get there that night.  I kind of expected it from the moment I saw that my flight was delayed.  Maybe I should have had a better attitude, but I didn’t.  So we both shrugged our shoulders and pretended like the last 10 – 15 minutes never happened, and I headed toward my gate fully expecting that there was no way I was getting into Reno that night.  It bummed me out, too, as the golfing – the one part of the trip that I was stoked for – would be taking place the next morning, meaning that I would probably miss it.  So I might have had a bad attitude toward the trip, but I was hoping to have fun once I got there.

I breezed through security and sat down with a book to while away some time at my gate.  About 10 minutes before my flight was originally scheduled to leave, the airline folks made an announcement that there was a weather delay that held up the inbound flight, and they would turn it around just as fast as they could once it got there.  They didn’t say where the weather delay was, but I assumed it was in Atlanta.  Not long after that the plane landed, and the airline people announced that they would clean the plane and board us just as soon as possible.  It looked like they might depart on time.  I mean, at the announced, delayed time; not the actual, originally scheduled time.  Whatever.  It looked like they might depart on time for me to catch my flight from Phoenix to Reno.  So I was feeling cautiously optimistic.

That optimism slowly drained as the announced, delayed departure time crept closer.  A new announcement told me that there was a “maintenance issue with the aircraft,” and they were waiting for “maintenance personnel to clear it.”  That didn’t sound good, but no one wants to fly on a plane with known maintenance issues.  The departure time scooted by, and I got up to wait in what I figured was a soon-to-be long line to talk to the gate agent.  I wasn’t sure what to do, but I was not excited about arriving in Reno at some undisclosed time the next day.  I would miss the golf, and I might not be able to get there until late, meaning that I would have barely 36 hours there before having to get up ridiculously early to catch that ass crack of dawn flight home.  About the time I got up to get in line, the friendly airline people made an announcement  to explain the maintenance issue that had been holding us up:  one of the engines had been hit by lightning on the way in.  At that point, almost everyone in the gate area streamed into line to talk to the gate agent.  My prescience never seemed so … prescient, and I tried not to get hurt patting myself on the back for getting in line earlier.  All those people were in line behind me.  Some of them were apparently Very Important, though, as they couldn’t be bothered to wait in line, walking up to the front and telling the gate agent that they “just wanted to be rebooked on another flight.”  These Very Important people were not at all happy when my favorite gate agent ever told them that the rest of the people in line were probably wondering the same thing, and he would be happy to help them if they would just wait their turn in line.  I refrained from giving them a Nelson Muntz-ian “HA-ha,” along with an Abs-ian finger as they angrily walked away muttering, “I’ll just call the VIP reservations line, then.”  Good idea.  If you have a VIP number, why the hell would you get in line to wait?!  Ass clowns.

When it was my turn with the gate agent, he did some keyboard-tapping before telling me that there were no other flights to Reno that I could go on that night.  I felt a little déjà vu here, but thanked him for checking.  He told me that I could either spend the night in Phoenix or spend it in DC.  It was up to me, but it would probably be better to go to Phoenix.  I didn’t get into whom it was better for or pointing out that I had been through this before, and there was no chance I was going to give any terrorists another chance to force me to spend a day of vacation in an airport.  Instead, I said, “Here’s the thing.  If I can’t get there by tomorrow morning, it’s kind of not worth going.”  As if they’d give me a refund or even credit toward a future flight or something.  Yeah, right.  I fully expected him to laugh demonically and say, “That’s TOO BAD!  You WILL go to Reno, OR YOU WILL LOSE YOUR MONEY!!  THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT!! THERE ARE FEWER AIRLINES THAN EVER AND MORE PEOPLE TRAVELING THAN EVER AND YOU HAVE LITTLE TO NO RECOURSE!!!! BWOOO-HA-HA!”

Instead, without batting an eye, my favorite gate agent ever said, “We can give you a refund.”  

That’s right.  He offered me a refund for my airfare.  And I didn’t even have to get mad or beg for it.  I snapped up the offer before he had a chance to rethink it.  It took a while to get it in the system, due to the fact that my ticket was through US Airways, but the flight was on America West, who had just merged with/bought US Airways, and the integration of their systems wasn’t really complete yet.  It took two gate agents with two computers and a phone to process my refund, but I did not once even start to make light bulb-related jokes.  As it turned out, they really only got it into the system for processing, meaning that I wouldn’t have my money back for a while, and I only had a vague, non-official looking piece of paper as proof that I should get a refund at all.  However, I wasn’t going to fight that battle at this point, and I started to head home.  

I remembered just in time to ask for my bags back, and they managed to produce them in only 15 – 20 minutes.  I grabbed them and headed home, feeling as if someone had just given me an extra weekend.

I felt bad for missing Bino’s bachelor party, but he was stuck drinking beers in the Denver airport when I called to tell him that I wouldn’t make it.  Apparently, the weather (probably in Atlanta) was delaying his flight as well.  So he was very understanding.  As it turns out, I got to play a couple of rounds of golf that weekend, and none of the people attending the bachelor party had to spend the whole weekend sitting in airports.  I even got my refund for the plane ticket about a month later without having to call and bitch at people.  Everybody wins.  

Maybe, this summer, the best trip for me was one I didn’t take.