Holiday Travel: Thoughts and Frustrations

I'm not going to lie to you: I'm sitting here in an airport, anticipating sitting here for the next hour at least still waiting for a plane that should have taken me away three and a half hours ago. I'm writing because I'm bored. And annoyed. The ironic part is that whatever is delaying the planes (am I supposed to believe that the weather in Chicago is affecting 2/3 of the delayed Southwest flights?) is clearly only impacting Southwest. All the other airlines with flights to Salt Lake City seem to be on time. Very shifty. By the time I get home, I could have driven from Denver to Salt Lake in the same amount of time.

Of course, this flight home (from Texas) is the perfect foil for the flight to Texas which also encountered similar delays also without the excuse of weather. That flight went from Salt Lake to Denver and then, supposedly, to Amarillo when the plane would continue on to Dallas. The plane left Salt Lake nearly an hour late and left Denver a half hour after that for some undisclosed reason. Within five minutes of descending to the Amarillo airport the fog rolled in and the plane went straight to Dallas. I'd like to point out that we wouldn't have had to worry about the fog had we not been delayed that hour plus.

ONLY good thing about the flight to Texas.

So there I am, in Amarillo, exceedingly annoyed. But Southwest thinks it over and decides to set us up in a hotel in Dallas (on their dime—which was the least they could do) and create a new flight to fly us all back to Amarillo the next morning. Of course, this is Christmas Eve morning, and I don't know about you, but I do not like to be traveling on the day before Christmas. I want to be with my family doing Christmassy stuff.

So there you go. Naturally, the trip there had to be matched by an equally cruddy trip back.

And I'm still waiting for the snow. You know, the excuse for this. Instead, I heard one of the employees mentioning not having enough crew and having to scramble to find them.

Very shifty.

I'll be sending them a strongly (but politely) worded email.

Of course, this doesn't even begin to touch the travel saga of the Christmas of 2008. Those were dark times.