Airports

Airports have become a way of life ever since my mom started working in the airline business. I have been very fortunate to fly many places, but flying standby is not always an enjoyable experience. It can be extremely stressful, as you have no idea when you will actually be allowed to get on a flight. For the most part, I have gotten the flights I've wanted; but there have been some situations that were less than desirable.

            The biggest one was definitely flying home from Germany in December 2009. In total, it took my friend and me 7 days to get home. We started out in Germany and flew to the Netherlands. There we stayed two nights with a good friend of mine. Then we left out of Amsterdam and flew to London. Here was the main issue...London. There had been some extreme weather conditions in London a few days before we arrived, and it had caused at least two flights to the USA to be canceled. This meant that we now had 500 people ahead of us. All in all, we spent four days in London just waiting for the flight that would get us home.
         During that time we were able to make some friends and have at least a little fun and laughter, but most of that was just sleep deprivation. :P We only had one flight left to hope for, and there was still a group of us who needed to get on. You cannot imagine the celebration that occurred once we found out that we had all received tickets to fly to New York City.
        After arriving in the States, we learned that we were to take a bus/van to Connecticut where my uncle would pick us up. That all went pretty smoothly, and we got back to his house at 2am on Christmas Eve. After getting a few hours of sleep, we headed to the Hartford airport and there our paths split. My friend was able to change her purchased ticket and was therefore set to go. She got back to California Christmas Eve night after flying through Philadelphia. I still had to fly standby, but thankfully I had no issue getting from Hartford to Detroit.
      In Detroit there was more bad weather conditions which made it necessarily for me to seek shelter with another good friend of mine. They were gracious enough to include me in their Christmas plans. What a blessing they were! Then very early on Christmas morning I headed out of Detroit and made a flight to Minneapolis, and then after a few hours wait, I finally made it back to my home airport. If you lost count, I had to go through 9 airports when only 3 is usually sufficient.

This all came back to mind as I am sitting here in Minneapolis airport trying to get out to California. This could take a while...

    Have you had any interesting airport experiences?