Flight fiasco

So my "first time flying alone" flights last weekend turned into a nightmare. There was a domino effect of each plane being late, which in turn caused me to miss my last flight out of MN. On top of that, somewhere in between Logan and Detroit my cell phone decided to reprogram itself into thinking it's a verizon phone, thus rendering it completely useless. I was unable to call anyone, including Jonny T, who was supposed to be picking me up in Iowa an hour from my being grounded in MN, at 11:30pm central. The airline decided to put me up in a sleazy hotel in Bloomington, gave me $13 worth of food vouchers, and found me a flight for 10:30 the next morning. After waiting in line for 2 hours to locate my checked luggage so that I could have more than the airline "I screwed you over, so here's some travel shampoo and an oversized tshirt, good luck" bag, I found a payphone, frantically called Alltel and got my phone working again, then caught the shuttle they had arranged to get to the hotel.

On my shuttle bus ride back to the hotel, I was the only person in the van, so the van driver decided to strike up conversation with me. At this point I was cranky, trying to call everyone I could with my newly recussitated phone, and didn't like the way the looked at me when he helped me put my bag in the van. I decided to be polite and answer the guy's typical questions with a simple "Boston," "My flight was misconnected," "Iowa," and then mistakenly mentioned the food voucher the airline gave me. I told him because I thought he might know how one uses said voucher, and later thought it would've been a better idea to just ask the front desk guy. The van driver (roughly in his early 30's) invited himself to share my voucher with me and give me some company. Yeah. I was thisclose to just leaning over and punching him hardcore in the balls, but I refrained and gracefully said, "thank you but no," and didn't speak to him again. When we finally got to the hotel, I wearily checked in and locked myself in my room. I splurged the food voucher on a salad, diet pop, water, and a piece of cheesecake to counteract the healthy stuff (and to utuilize as a little comfort food) and got my stuff ready for the next morning. I had been up since 6:20 eastern, which means 5:20 central time, and finally had my head uncomfortably meet the pillow in MN at 2:00am.

The next morning I got up and completely ready for the day. I even flew in the dress I was wearing to the wedding. Fortunately this puddle-hopper flight went off without a hitch and I even had the whole seat-row to myself. After giving a huge sigh of relief to finally see Jonny T, we were back in a car for a 3 hour drive to the wedding. The wedding festivities went well, although I don't remember much of anything past the reception (and even some parts of that are fuzzy), but it was good to see the 6th north crew again.
On my way home, I connected through MN again and had a (planned) 3 hour layover, so I got a chance to see Megan and go out for dinner. Seeing my friends like that again made this whole fiasco completely worth it, I miss them a lot. Of course, my flight from MN to Logan ended up landing an hour late, so TJ (who met me at the airport in Logan to help me get home) and I weren't able to catch public transportation which ends at midnight (I finally got my bags by about 11:59), and were stuck shelling out $35 for a cab.

For this trip, I used a free voucher that I got from volunteering to be bumped from a Northwest Airlines flight last January. Flying Northwest with 2 connecting flights in the middle was worth every penny I spent on it...


worthless.