On the Hell that is Air Travel

Time has a way of smoothing out rough edges. Memories tend to get a rose-colored tint that makes you think, maybe the world was better back in 2004 (it wasn’t lol, it was just bad in different ways), things that seemed important get put into context, and emotions that ran hot as a smelter are able to cool to a nice even temperature…well not today mother fucker! I’m still hot as hell about how TERIFFICALLY shitty my last air travel experience was.

I want to put this part right up front before I devolve into the frothing mess I’m sure to become. This trip and all its trials and tribulations were worth it one MILLION times over because it was all to see Ruthie Peterman roll that odometer over to triple digits. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

With that being said, HOLY SHIT what an ordeal! It all starts at 5 am on a Thursday. My parents, my girlfriend, and I are supposed to fly from Burbank airport to Dallas, then from Dallas to Madison, and bingo bango, we’re at the hotel before 10 pm ready to have a great weekend. LOL, yeah right. Minutes before our plane leaves from Burbank, we get notified that our flight to Madison is canceled. Not delayed, just canceled…and it’s the only one that day. Well, shit. It’s okay, we’ll figure something out in Dallas. We get to Dallas and the best thing we can do is grab a flight to Chicago, rent a car, and drive to Madison. No problem, totally doable. Well actually, there’s a tornado and a thunderstorm heading into Dallas in a few hours…so we’ll either just die right there in the DFW airport or blast through the storm like some kind of incredibly heroic (and insane) sci-fi pilot.

So, after 5 hours of delays and running around that godforsaken airport, we make it out…and we fly through white-knuckle turbulence for the entire 3-hour flight. It was bad enough that a woman had to crawl down the aisle to the bathroom on her hands and knees to puke because she’d run out of barf bags. After what felt like a lifetime of being in a blender, we made it just in time to rent a car. I, then, heroically drove us nearly three hours to Madison and arrived right around 3 am, nearly 20 hours after we started our day…oh and the airlines lost my parents’ luggage somewhere along the way.

Then we had a lovely weekend full of celebration and wonderful emotions! Unfortunately, that ended and my girlfriend and I had to fly home on Sunday so we could get to work on Monday morning.

We were slated to fly from Madison to Phoenix, then a quick hop, skip, and a jump back to Burbank and we’d be home. LOL, YEAH RIGHT! Our flight out of Madison got delayed and delayed and delayed and eventually, it was delayed right past our connecting flight…which was the last flight from Phoenix to Southern California…so, that’s right, I rented a car and drove us nearly six hours through sand storms and through rain storms, but I got us home! Unfortunately, we arrived home at 4:30 am so I slept for an hour, fell out of bed, and then spent an entire day teaching high schoolers and just destroying my body with caffeine.

So, the moral of the story is: only leave your house if it is DESPERATELY necessary because the world out there is MEAN and it will WRECK you even if you’re going to see your sweet sweet grandma.

What’s your worst travel story? I bet there are some doozies out there.