Feeling Minnesota

I’ve been in a fantasy football league for about 20 years. I’m still the new guy in the league celebrating its 25th year. In non-COVID years, the league gets together to draft in person. It’s a fun “guys” weekend but we’re not in our 20s or even 30s anymore, so the activities related to the draft weekends usually involve going to a baseball game or other tourist destinations rather than late nights out at bars or clubs. Or so I’ve heard! Based on my schedule and the start of the kids’ school year, I’ve only attended a few drafts in person. Atlanta was fun, Jensen Beach, Florida was interesting, and the Northern Virginia drafts were a blast. Still, after a long break from being at a draft in person, I decided I was definitely going this year. This year in Minneapolis! And the Minnesota State Fair! And with Weird Al Yankovic! Maybe! 

On Thursday morning, I received this email from American Airlines:

Disruptive weather conditions are forecast to impact portions the Northeast, which may affect your upcoming travel on American Airlines. Your flight is currently on time, but we are offering options if you would like to proactively change your travel plans. That means you could travel on a different date or time or use a different airport to make your connection.

I watched Good Morning America in the morning, and though they discussed severe storms between Vermont and Virginia, I didn’t think much of it since the local weather showed thunderstorms starting around 5:00 in the DC area. Our flight was at 3:50. My friends and I got in the car to drive to the airport around 1:15, and just as we left my street, we got notification that the flight was delayed. Our plane was coming from New York and got stuck thanks to poor weather there. Not ideal but not terrible. We went back inside my house and played video games as members of my family arrived home from school surprised to see me and my friends still there.

We finally left around 4:00 and parked at a hotel near DCA since I made parking reservations there. As an aside, hotel parking for the airport is a great deal. With tax, you usually pay about $15 a day to park in a covered garage and you get a shuttle to the airport. Daily economy parking at DCA is $25 for an open-air parking lot and you still need to take a bus to the terminal. We ate dinner at a restaurant at Pentagon City, walked back to the hotel, and arrived at the airport for a 7:55 flight. 

Through security, we got notified at 6:51 that the flight was delayed to 10:00. Lovely. A few minutes later, another notification that the flight was delayed to midnight. What? Then 2:00 AM, then 4:00 AM, then 6:00 AM. What the what?

The weather was the problem earlier but now it was air traffic control issue. We talked to someone at American at the airport who confirmed that the flight was delayed to 6:00 AM the following morning and assured us that we’d be fine leaving the next day. You see where this is going, right? 

We debated about getting the car to go to our respective homes to then try to meet up again before 4:00 AM, go back to the hotel since we had the parking reservations, and then Uber/Lyft to DCA since the shuttle doesn’t operate that early. Seemed like a lot of time and hassle spent to get little sleep, so we decided to get a room at the hotel for the night. Got a great price and Alexis and Tony were extremely helpful. You know, let me plug the Embassy Suites at Crystal City National Airport. Nice rooms with a free breakfast and great staff. And if this Embassy Suites wants to be the official blog of Sean's Ramblings, we can talk! 

And at just after 10:00 PM, we got notification that the 6:00 AM flight was canceled. Not delayed, cancelled. Completed cancelled. We called American and asked about options. We looked into leaving out of Dulles or BWI or even Richmond or Philadelphia. Or flying into Duluth or Sioux City. The “best” option was flying out of DCA around noon to get into Dallas for a 3:30 PM flight to get us into Minneapolis at 6:19 PM, over 24 hours later than the originally scheduled flight. We took it.

After a tasty breakfast at Embassy Suites, including the chef at the omelet station “cooking” two donuts on a grill with cheese in the middle (hey, we planned on spending the entire day at the Minnesota State Fair and the flight cancellation significantly decreased the amount of time at the fair and opportunities to eat fair food), we made it back to DCA and on to Dallas-Fort Worth. 

And then another delay at DFW. Ugh. We landed just before 7:00, got a ride from the airport, and arrived at the front gate of the fairgrounds at 7:33. I got cheese on a stick just minutes later.

We arrived at our seats just minutes before Weird Al started the show.

Weird Al was fantastic. Such a fun show with lots of costume changes. While most of Weird Al’s songs are silly, he and the band are seriously gifted musicians. Although most of the exhibits and venues at the state fair were closed after the concert, I enjoyed a deep fried apple pie with cinnamon ice cream. 

We were unsuccessful in buying a bucket of cookies since the lines were outrageous. These cookies by Sweet Martha's Cookie Jar are a really big deal. However, outside the venue, we saw three guys probably around 18 with more cookies than they were going to eat. We approached them with a $1 bill in hand, explained that we were from out of town and wanted experience the state fair cookie, and offered them money for a cookie. In hindsight, this seems really creepy. Even at the time, I felt like this.

 

They ended up being Minnesota nice and gave us a cookie for free. 

As for the rest of the weekend, I played fowling (which is a football meets bowling game) and whirlyball (basketball meets lacrosse in bumper cars) for the first time. I was fairly useless in helping our team successfully complete a difficult escape room played in multiple rooms and floors. I ate famous blueberry pancakes and an infamous burger. Went to a Twins game too. We stayed at an awesome sports-themed Airbnb with bubble hockey, video games, a poker table, and a hockey room. Oh, the fantasy football draft also happened. My team has a lot of high-risk, high-reward possibilities which is a nice way of writing that it probably isn’t very good. But you don’t care about my fantasy team.

So that’s it. Or is it. On the flight back from Minneapolis, about 35 minutes out from our scheduled arrival, the captain announced that there were thunderstorms in DC, so he was instructed to slow down and basically hold the flight south of Pittsburgh. He said we don’t have a lot of extra fuel (which you definitely don’t want to hear as a passenger!!!!), but enough to get to DCA and that we’ll land about 40 minutes late. Fortunately, the storm moved past the airport, and we only arrived about 15-20 minutes behind schedule.

The overall verdict is that it was an amazing weekend. I was one of over 200,000 people who attended the Minnesota State Fair, marking a record for the biggest attendance on the festival's first Friday, but I only got a small taste of the event. I'd love to go back, but I think the lesson here is that I'm never flying to Minneapolis again (at least from DCA)!

By the way, I never saw the movie referenced in this post's title.

The Longest Day

A trip from Jacksonville to Northern Virginia should take about 4-5 hours door to door including time spent at the airport going through security and waiting to board the flight. So why did my trip Tuesday take 10 hours? Let’s take a look.

7:30 AM: Wake up with a dog sleeping next to me.

7:50 AM: Check flight status and see that my 11:00 AM flight is delayed an hour and a half. Look through other flight options and click “select” showing another flight going from Jacksonville to Atlanta and then Atlanta to Washington National.

8:00 AM: Realize that clicking select actually changed my flight. Then realize that I cannot change back to my original flight. Good news: Based on the delay on my original flight, the new flight gets in about 30 minutes earlier. Bad news: Need to leave for the airport immediately even though I’m not close to being ready.

9:05 AM: Arrive at Jacksonville Airport

9:35 AM: Arrive at gate only to see that the flight to Atlanta is delayed meaning that I would likely miss my connection. Change back to original flight. Delta staff member tells me that it’s always better to go direct and avoid Atlanta. I should know about avoiding Atlanta.

10:10 AM Discover that Delta moved the gate of my flight. Then, I see that my flight is delayed another half hour.

10:15 AM: According to a travel guy on CNN, he predicts that airfare will either go up or down in 2012. Extremely bold prediction!

10:15 AM - 12:45 PM: Am extremely happy that I have an iPad and that Jacksonville has free wireless. Spend too much time on Twitter and playing Angry Birds. I also ate lunch at Chili’s. They have yummy fries.



1:15 PM: Finally leave Jacksonville 2+ hours after the originally scheduled flight time.

3:00ish: Circle Richmond due to heavy traffic around National.

3:20 PM: Go over Georgetown University and see the Kennedy Center, Watergate, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial & Jefferson Memorial, but we’re way too high to land. Apparently, there is a plane on the runway. Circle National.

3:30 PM: Told that we can’t land at National due to weather. Heading to Philadelphia to see Jaromir Jagr. (They didn’t actually say this.)



4:00 PM: Land in Philadelphia. Not allowed to leave aircraft, but have a jolly good time waiting in line for the one restroom on the back of the plane. They ran out of paper towels, so I had to use Kleenex to wipe my hands.

5:30 PM: Depart Philadelphia

5:40 PM: Delta announces that they thank their SkyMiles passengers for flying Delta. Sure, I realize that you have to say that we can use approved electronic devices, but was it really necessary to include the SkyMiles passengers announcement again?

6:10 PM: Arrive at National airport.

7:00 PM: Finally arrive home to a purring and meowing cat extremely happy to see me.

7:10 PM: Clogged toilet

In case you’re curious, according to Google Maps, the trip would have take 11 hours & 44 minutes if I drove. I also read 200 pages of Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt For His Assassin. Great book. Oh, Ziggy has been sitting on my lap the entire time I typed this post.

Hell is AirTran at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport

Flight delays, cancellations, two people working at customer service with over 100 people in line, missing pilots and/or flight crews and no one to help you at the gate. Welcome to Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport on Sunday, July 13 and Monday, July 14! I should be writing this post from the Washington DC area, but unfortunately, I am not home. Hundreds of flights were cancelled and delayed on Sunday due to a storm. Although we arrived a few hours late, we were able to make it from Jacksonville to Atlanta Sunday evening in time for our flight to Baltimore-Washington International. However, our 7:50pm flight was delayed to 11:50pm. No problem as we had a lovely dinner at the airport Chili’s. And then we waited and waited and waited and watched for updates on the screen. The flight was rescheduled to 12:30am. We saw other flights rescheduled for 2:45am and 3:00am. At 12:25, the airline changed our gate. At approximately 1:30am, my brother called informing me that according to the AirTran website, our flight was cancelled. We didn’t receive official word at the gate about this until close to 2:00. By this time, we were already on hold with AirTran for nearly 25 minutes before someone answered. We are now returning on the next available flight; late Tuesday morning as there were no flights on Monday on AirTran to Dulles, National or BWI. 

The next step: where is our luggage and how do we get it? The answer: I don’t know! We went to baggage claim and had to ask AirTran to pull our luggage. After waiting another hour and fifteen minutes, we learned that our luggage is probably on its way to Baltimore. For all we know, the luggage could still be in Jacksonville or in some other tropical location like Cleveland. While the delays and cancellations were completely due to the weather, I feel that AirTran deserves plenty of blame. They did not have nearly enough staff at the gates, at the baggage claim, for the planes, or available at customer service to assist the thousands of stranded passengers. The reason our flight was cancelled was because there were no flight attendants available. Apparently, the gate staff was counting on the flight attendants from a flight that arrived around 1:00 to work the Atlanta to BWI flight. However, that particular crew had already served the maximum number of hours it could for the day. AirTran should have realized this and either had another crew or cancelled the flight much earlier. Delta encountered the same problems as AirTran, but the Delta gates were empty by midnight as all of its flights either departed or were cancelled. Concourse C, where all of the AirTran gates were located, looked like it was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving even though it was 2:20am. 

To top everything off, I awoke in the middle of the night (for me that was close to 7:00am after going to sleep around 5:00 after leaving the airport) with a terrible cramp in the back on my leg. Off to Walmart to try and find some socks and underwear! 

Update 2:55pm - I now have socks, underwear and deodorant courtesy of Target (and my credit card)! I also learned that our luggage made it to BWI. Finally, courtesy of Atlanta's WSB-TV, "Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue said he believes visitors to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport should be allowed to carry concealed weapons under a bill he signed into law earlier this year." Based on the amount of angry people at the Atlanta airport, I can't think of a worse idea. 

Update Tuesday, July 15 - 4:30pm – We’re home! Our luggage arrived at BWI well before we did, but it was at the airport waiting for us. Thanks to DJ, Poof and Heinz for accommodating us refugees while in Atlanta. For everyone else who struggled traveling on Sunday or Monday because of weather/AirTran problems, feel free to continue posting your comments. It can be very therapeutic and you’re among friends who understand what you went through.