The travel day from hell started at 5:45 AM when I left my house for the airport on no sleep after finishing my night shift at 2:30 AM. On the way to the airport, I decided that missing my flight was less important than dying, so at 7:00 AM I pulled off the road for a 20 minute nap. I arrived in the terminal at 7:45 AM to catch my 8:10 AM flight only to discover that my flight to Chicago was cancelled. We were all crammed on the 10:30 AM flight, which could not leave the airport due to fog. We sat on the runway for 30 minutes after finally loading onto the plane. Finally, we arrived in Chicago, but naturally I had missed my 12:00 connection to Tucson. At 4:55 PM, I finally boarded the final plane of my journey. Upon our arrival in Tucson around 8:30 PM, we could not deplane because there were not enough “walkways” for all the planes on the ground. In addition, there were not enough personell to unload all the planes so I did not get my baggage until about 9:30 PM. After many miles of driving, i finally found a hotel whose cost seemed reasonable to me. I tried to get into room 203 with my keycard after lugging my bag up a flight of concrete stairs. The keycard did not work. My bagged and I tumbled back down the steps where the desk clerk assured me he had corrected my keycard. We trudged back up the steps, and it still did not work. I left my bag upstairs, went back down to the desk, and got a keycard for the next room. Lo and behold, this one worked! But the room was not cleaned…dirty sheets and beer bottles were strewn everywhere. Back down the concrete steps I slogged and finally got a key to a room with a clean bed and sheets…17 hours after leaving my house.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
