Our "Spring Break" vacation starts today. We've been greatly looking forward to this, because we haven't been out of town since Thanksgiving, which hadn't ended so well, so we were hoping things might go a little better this time. But once again, providences converged to divert our plans...
We arrived at our gate at the airport about an hour early, like one is supposed to. After we had sat there a while, though, the gate attendant got on the PA and told us that the plane was going to be about half an hour late. This worried me slightly, because this meant that our layover in Saint Louis would be one and a half hours instead of two. After the plane finally arrived, the gate attendant got on the PA and said that the plane had maintenance issues, and that he would keep us informed of any new developments. (Strangely enough, through the window i saw that our plane was painted a non-descript white, and had no discriminating marks of the carrier, which was USAir.) Just about then, it started to rain. I did a quick estimation on my notepad, and realized that we would probably not make our connecting flight in St. Louis, which was with Frontier Air. I called my dad to get the 800 number for Frontier to see if there was anything that we could do about this. Around this time, the gate attendant announced that the flight was cancelled due to the aforementioned maintenance issues. The crowd gave a murmur of dismay and went to the special services desk a ways down the terminal to recover what they could of their travel plans.
Rachel went to find a power outlet to charge her cell phone, and i waited in the customer service line and called Frontier to determine our connection options. Sadly, Frontier had no other flights from St. Louis that day, so we were going to have to come up with an alternative to our original plans, which was to fly to San Francisco to visit Brother Tom for a few days. The Frontier flight did layover in Denver, so I determined to try and get a flight there if we couldn't get to STL.
Someone behind the service desk asked if there was anyone in the line trying to get to St. Louis, and most of the people in the really long line raised their hands. The desk agent told us to go back to our gate because they were going to try to get us a new plane. I followed the annoyed herd back to the gate, but I realized that most of these people may be able to get to St. Louis in time for the NCAA tournament game that evening (You don't know the meaning of "March Madness" until you're in an airport with lots of people all trying to get to the same city on such short notice), but Rachel and I still were not going to be able to connect with our other flight and pass through to San Fran, so I went back to the service desk, also realizing that i no longer knew where Rachel was, because i didn't see where she went while i was standing in line the first time. Her phone went straight to voicemail, so I just stood in line waiting to see what would happen next.
I got to the front of the line and explained the situation and asked the lady behind the counter what was possible. Apparently the way i had arranged things was to our disadvantage in this case, because USAir was only contracted to get us to St. Louis, and was not willing to get us to Denver. (This was not the last of the little rules i was to come up against in trying to salvage this vacation of ours.) Not knowing what else to do, i rescheduled the flight to St. Louis for Tuesday, which was to be the day we were going to return to St. Louis from San Fran anyway. This way, whatever we did with ourselves in the intervening time, we would still be able to keep our reservation with Bluegreen in Branson, Missouri for the rest of the week. (That's right, folks, Bluegreen is tangled up in this, too!)
About this time, Rachel showed up again, so I told her what I did. She agreed it was probably the best we could do under the circumstances, and we went to find a place to sit down and assess the situation and charge my phone, which was also about to fall asleep. I called Frontier Airlines to cancel our flight, and the nice lady on the other end told me that she couldn't refund our money because the tickets were non-refundable, but that we would each have a non-transferable credit for the cost of our tickets, less a $100 re-booking fee for each of us when we used these credits. We had to rebook by December 11th, 2005, and we could book our tickets up to 11 months ahead of time. I got off the phone and told Rachel all this, after which we both proceeded to denunciate all involved: USAir, Frontier Airlines, and Bluegreen for whose sampler points' sake we had done all this in the first place.
We finished our venting, and then I realized that we hadn't yet retrieved our checked baggage from the ill-fated flight to Missouri yet. We split up: Rachel went to the gate to find our bags and i went to the service desk again to try and make lemonade out of these lemons by extending our time in Missouri. I realized that I was going to have to arrange any new flight time and accommodations in Missouri pretty much simultaneously because i didn't know what airplane seats or rooms in Branson were available until I asked the respective service agents. So while I was in the USAir service desk line, I called the Bluegreen customer service number. I told the Bluegreen agent what i wanted to do, and he put me on hold to see if he could do it. Somewhere along the line, i realized that our reservations were to check out on Friday morning, but our flight back to Charlotte wasn't until Saturday, so i was going to have to see if we could extend that back end of our reservation as well as the front end. (Somehow, the person who took the original reservation all the way back in January misunderstood me when I asked for "Tuesday through Friday". Strike two, Bluegreen.)
When I got to the front of the USAir service line, i was still on hold with the Bluegreen service agent. The USAir lady just shifted me over to the side and took care of other people waiting until i was ready. To make a long story short, between these two agents of the market, this is what i found out:
So we weren't going to make it to San Francisco because a plane broke down, and we were going to have to find accommodations elsewhere on Friday night, somewhere between Branson and St. Louis, because a telephone agent and I misunderstood each other all the way back in January. It's a crazy world.
While i had been on the phone, Rachel kept trying to call in to tell me where she was, but for some reason, my call-waiting would beep once, and then disconnect her. This had happened a couple of times. So after all this rigmarole, I called her back and agreed to meet her in Baggage claim. On the way there, I stopped at an ATM and got $20 cash on a whim. I found her sitting in the baggage claim looking somewhat despondent and threw myself into the seat next to her. We just sat there taking time to recover, wondering what to do next. I called Tom to tell him that we wouldn't be making it out to San Fran, and while i was talking to him, my cell phone went dead. Rachel and i both burst out laughing.
We walked out the the parking lot shuttle stop. Rachel told me that she didn't really want to go home, because hanging around at home wasn't really a vacation, because there was always something that needed to be done, and we hadn't been out of town for so long before that, anyway. A light bulb appeared over my head, and i said, "Why don't we go to the farm?" Her face lit up just like I hoped it would, and she called home as we got on the shuttle bus to confirm our last minute "reservations" at the McCune Homestead. While we drove north to Virginia, we discussed how we might be able to use our credit with Frontier Airlines, which is mainly a western concern and doesn't come out as far as South Carolina. The next day, i put the $20 bill in the offering plate at church to acknowledge the out-working of God's Providence in the events of the weekend, and to thank him for caring about each and every one of our steps on this earth.
