My husband and I just got home from two weeks in France. And when I say “just” I mean that we’ve been home in our actual house for approximately five hours. I’ve slept three out of the past 36 hours but I wanted to share a quick story before I take a nap.
We live in central Virginia. For this trip, we flew from our local airport up to Dulles Airport (just outside of Washington, DC) and then on to Paris. And the return trip was the same in reverse.
So yesterday we woke up in Paris and our flight left Charles de Gaulle at 5 pm Central European Time. We landed at Dulles at around 7 pm Eastern Time. We had a three-hour layover and our second flight was scheduled for 10:15 and would last less than half an hour.
(In another post, I’ll talk more about the pros and cons of this travel arrangement, versus our long-time habit of driving the 2+ hours to Dulles, parking the car for the duration of our travels, and then driving home while exhausted. )
Here’s a timeline of what actually happened last night:
9:15 pm Saturday: Arrive at the gate at Dulles prepared to start boarding at 9:30.
9:30: Boarding is delayed.
10:00: As we are walking out to the tarmac to get on the small regional jet, we are informed there is a mechanical issue and we need to go back inside to the gate.
10:15: Our flight is changed to another plane at a nearby gate. We got lucky that a plane was available so quickly.
11:15: We finally take off. The return flight is anticipated to be 15-20 minutes.
11:35: We start the descent into our home airport, but then it feels like we’re climbing again. Moments later we learn that fog has rolled into the area and it is so thick that the pilots cannot land. We head back to Dulles.
Midnight Sunday (today): We’re back at Dulles. Our flight has been rescheduled for 7:45 am.
1:00 am: We’re at a nearby hotel, with our room and taxi fare paid for by the airline. At this point, we’ve been awake for nearly 24 hours.
6:00: We are on the hotel shuttle and heading back to Dulles. (Side note: Thanks to TSA Precheck, we zipped through the security line in well under 10 minutes.)
7:15: After getting breakfast, we arrive at our assigned gate for a 7:45 departure.
8:00: We board the plane.
9:30: Due to fog (again) at our local air, our flight is delayed until the weather improves.
9:55: We land at our home airport.
So now we’re home and rather sleep-deprived, but hey WE ARE HOME. These things happen and, all things considered, it wasn’t that bad.
Also, in the list of misadventures with flights, this incident does not even rank in our top 3 for crappy experiences. So far, leaving Bali remains the worst, with leaving Maui on New Year’s Eve and then landing at LAX and having our flights canceled an intertwined second and third.
A few more notes before I hit publish on this and go take a nap:
Always have the airline app on your phone so that you get updates as the situation changes, including your new flight information.
Know your rights in these situations and be prepared to patiently and politely ask for reasonable support. In this case, we needed hotel rooms and ground transportation, both of which the airline paid for. Some airlines are better at this than others. Unfortunately, not everyone realized that hotel rooms and taxis were on offer, and ended up spending the night in the airport at the gate.
Be kind to staff. Yes, you are tired. Yes, you are frustrated. However, the weather and other delays are totally out of the airline employees’ control. Don’t take it out on them. They are there to help you figure things out. One supervisor overruled the initial offer of some crappy food vouchers and worked to get us free hotel rooms and ground transportation there. In the meantime, the passengers on our flight quickly figured out who amongst were jackasses.
And on that note, I need to wrap up this hasty post and go take a dang nap.
If you feel up to it, tell me about some of your travel misadventures.
The joys of being a writer means that every experience- from good to sublime, from bad to ridiculous- can become a story you can tell!
My favorite example for you (and your readers) is the time we spent the first day of our decades-in-the-planning trip to Italy at the Heathrow airport in a miles long line. Our flight out of New York was delayed by hours (spent held captive in the plane on the tarmac while they fixed landing gear. Yes, please attend to that landing gear!) and then, despite being hours late for our connecting flight we’d been delighted upon deplaning at Heathrow that we’d already been rebooked for new flights. We hustled through security only to be told that we need not have bothered- no one was going anywhere, despite the sunny skies we could see outside the window there was a “low ceiling” event preventing every plane from taking off. This was to have been our first and only day in Milan, the beginning of another couples honeymoon, the start of dorm move in for a Transylvanian music student and his family, the arrival home after a long and disappointing vacation for a couple of homesick German girls… There were a lot of grumpy faces of people who weren’t where they were meant to be. This was the first day of my long awaited vacation. I’d managed to leave home and I was surrounded by citizens of the world and I wanted to enjoy myself so I started talking and asking questions of everyone whose path I crossed. And in a serpentining miles or kilometers long path that was a lot of people. Mostly we met other Americans, Europeans- from many countries, and residents of the UK but there were a couple South Americans and probably a couple Asians. I don’t remember any Africans. To date it’s one of my most treasured travel memories. Once people (most, not all) surrendered into the understanding that this was our situation for the next 20 or so hours we became a community. We shared resources. We shared laughter and encouragement. We celebrated the successes when people managed to get new flights and we shared the disappointment of those who would spend even longer awaiting resolution. As in all of life there was inequity and hardship but there were also many hugs, shared tears and loud cheers. I saw the world from my place in line at Heathrow airport in September 2016.
I’m glad for you + thoroughly impressed with your abilities. Please do tell how you got the airline to pay for a hotel…Alaska straight-up refused twice to spring for a hotel when we were weather & ‘available gate’ delayed out of Raleigh/landing at SeaTac and they closed the boarding doors *in view of us [plus half a dozen others connecting]running*. Then they sent an empty & demeaning “aw, there there” reply to my complaint afterward. Luckily our friend on the flight had a bunch of Marriott points to get a double room we could share, and there was a hotel shuttle. I promise I put on my kindest teacher/mom face & used a professional voice but they wouldn’t even make eye contact with us when they said no. 😒