Or: What I did on my 4th of July vacation.
I’ve come home from the first of my summer of carshows, working for HIN-NOPI. We produce car shows and have a series of seven this summer. The first of these was in the Boston area, technically Epping, NH. This story starts with a checked bag fee and spending 8 hours in the airport and finishes with a nearly random freestyle dance-off and my executing more parts of the show than I had worked in before. Let’s take a look at how this all happened.
6am Thursday, July 1. I stand in line with my luggage to be checked at the gate to Hartsfield-Jackson International (Also just known as ATL). It takes nearly 40 minutes to get through the line. Most of that time was spent waiting on this older guy to come back with change for my baggage fee. If I had known the time it would have taken, I would have used a card for the $15 fee. In line with me, however, was one of my bosses and a couple of other people from my company, so at least I wasn’t alone in this.
Checking through security is really a straightforward process now: Take off your shoes and put them in a tub. Take your laptop out of its case and place it in a tub. Take out everything on you that is metal or might have metal in it (This means don’t wear riveted jeans) and put it in a tub. Somehow no matter now easy the process is, someone is going to mess it up. Mr. Cowboy with his big hat apparently didn’t get the memo or read the hundreds of signs that were posted regarding the process because his brain-sized belt buckle alerted TSA that this guy was carrying more metallic weight than a Colt .45 (and 2 zigzags). By the time I get to the gate, I get a nice view of our plane rolling away from the gate. We had missed it by 2 minutes.
For most people, missing the plane that is taking them to a weekend job is terrible. For us, missing that flight was only somewhat bad. We got our tickets changed over to standbys for each of the flights for the rest of the day to Boston. Now is a great time to introduce Cityguy Wisdom #3: “Never fly standby on a holiday weekend.”
The 9am flight: Overbooked
The 10:30 flight: Overbooked
The 11:45 flight: Full (but it took some standby’s on)
We didn’t get on an airplane destined for Boston until 12:30. When we did, it was also full, and we had to go back to the terminal. But not all was lost, there were another 6 flights to Boston that day, and we had standby tickets for em all. So did some interesting college students who came up with another plan to get to their destination.
I don’t know their names. I don’t know where they went. All I know is that they wanted to go to Boston somehow. We met these kids while waiting for our flights and talked to them for a while (though none of us thought to ask for names). They were going to UMASS for summer classes and were flying standby to reduce the price of their tickets but having no luck. They ended up getting standby tickets for a New York flight with plans to ride a bus the rest of the way.
Finally at 2:45pm, 8 and a half hours after our original plane took off, my boss and I took the last two seats on a direct flight to Boston. The rest of our crew flew up on the next flight.
(Part 2 to come)
McWheels5 