Monday, December 16, 2013

Disney Trip 2013 - Day 1, Part 1

Up at 4am after alarm went off.  No text or email alerts so far.  Left the hotel at 4:30 to go the the Parking Spot, then on to the airport.

Got to the airport about 5:20am.  No problems at security.  Flight before ours shows cancelled, but 7:20 flight still shows green with boarding scheduled for 6:55.

Nervous/stressed about the flight, so we walked from one end of the terminal to the other, then back to the gate.  We saw several people asleep in cots.

The plane was parked at the gate.  However at 6:45am they announced a flight delay to 7:30am due to a missing flight attendant.  Then they came back and announced a delay until 8:00am, then 8:10, then 8:30, then 8:40, 8:50, then 9:30am.  EXTREMELY ANXIOUS.  Todd was trying to lighten the mood by taking a video, but I wasn't having it.  You can practically hear my eyes rolling:




We were double-booked on the 2nd flight at 9:30, but now the first flight was bumped back to that time.  There was no guarantee the 2nd would take off, and it was at a different terminal - we had no idea if we should bail on the 1st flight to try to make the 2nd, or wait on the 1st and potentially miss the 2nd, and we had to decide and leave now if we were going to try to make the 2nd option.  Whichever way we chose we had the potential for that flight not taking off and losing the opportunity on the other flight.  So nerve racking.

Side note:  We didn't have travel insurance for this trip.  We normally do, but for some reason we decided not to buy it when we planned and book this trip almost a year ago.  Aside from really, really, really needing this vacation, if we didn't get out today we would start losing money.

Lesson learned:  Buy travel insurance - you never know what freak ice storm may be in your future.

We decided to stick with the flight that was missing the flight attendant.  Shortly afterward they announced that they weren't getting an answer when trying to check on the replacement flight attendant.  By this point it felt like my chest was going to explode and/or I was going to have an aneurysm.  Shortly after that announcement, we saw that the 2nd flight was delayed to 9:40am.

At 9:30am, they announced that the flight attendant is allegedly en route, but they have no idea where the person is coming from or how long it will take them to get here.  These are the actual announcements they made at the gate.  Everyone at the gate groaned and laughed.  Finally they announced that the flight attendant arrived on airport property and was on the way.  Cheers from the crowd.

At last we were allowed to board and taxi.  Through the plane's windows we could see the airport grounds were covered in ice.
You can see a couple of runway-clearer vehicles in the center-left of the picture
Bulldozers were scraping ice off the tarmac, and huge mounds of cleared ice were piled up everywhere.
Piles of ice
We de-iced at the end of the runway, then the pilot announced that the airport was closing that runway to clear it again, and that we would have to taxi to a runway on the other side of the airport.
De-icing
We finally took off at 11:00am.  We crested the cloud cover into clear blue skies.  The sun shining through the window was warm on my skin.  We sat next to a very nice woman named Maureen from Perth in Australia, and talked to her throughout the flight.
Blue skies over Dallas


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