Back From Vacation

This morning we got back from vacation.

The things is, we were supposed to get back from vacation YESTERDAY. I was supposed to have had diner last night in my own home, slept in my own bed, and woken up way too early. I would have gone for a run, and then I would have typed up a couple of really good and meaningful posts about a few things that took place while we were gone.

But no, we flew Delta.

Which means that, although our initial flight from Nice got into JFK without a hitch at a little past 1pm, and we rushed to get through immigration and to get our bags and to get through customs so we could recheck our bags for Boston, our 4PM flight had already been cancelled. Apparently, they are clairvoyant at Delta and just KNEW there would be storms 4 hours in advance.

We were then rescheduled to the 9PM flight, which ment we had 7 hours of waiting to do. With our kids. Who had just gotten off an 8 and a half hour flight, and whose little body clocks were running 6 hours ahead. It was fun.

At 9:25 the 9PM flight borded. We then circled the tarmac until 11:30. The crew of the plane were very curt, snapped at the passengers who asked that they didn't know anything and that the flight deck wasn't communicating, and then at 11:30 the pilot said the FDA only lets crew members fly for 14 hours at a time, and it had already been 14 hours, so the poor crew members had to be let off duty, and the plane had to return to the gate, and we had to get off and reschedule a flight for the next morning. (in a car, we would have been halfway to Boston by that time.)

As one young lady on the flight put it, obviously this wasn't the case. The crew members hadn't been flying at all, they had been circling the tarmac like the rest of us, wasting hours of our lives. BTW - we had been travelling for 24 hours at this point, so although I sympathize with overworked crew members theoretically, I didn't really give a flying fig about these particularly bouffantly coiffed fake blondes.

The Delta lady seemed sympathetic. She handed over some vouchers for food ($6 per person!) and a cab voucher and a hotel voucher. We rescheduled to a Laguardia flight the next AM, and then spent some time trying to figure out what was going to happen to our luggage, but was assured it would follow our new itinerary and a bus would carry the back to the other airport that night. (remember, about a hundred other people were in the exact same situation.)

Once we exited the airport, we could not re-enter. it was then that we discovered that the cab company didn't care about the vouchers, they just wanted the highest fare. We also had no ide where the hotel was and the cabbies acted as if they had never heard of it, and none of them wanted anything to do with the kids. They turned from us to the single folk standing nearby again and again. It's 1:30am. My kids had been fast asleep. They are exhausted. And the cabbies are turning us away.

Additionally, a pair of nice young men told us they had just returned from a hotel Delta sent them to that had been rejecting the Delta vouchers, turning the people away.

After thirty minutes of hopping back and forth across the street, we decided to pay for our own cab to Laguardia right away.

We had to stay at the main terminal. There were no benches. I spread out some blankets on the floor, and a nice homeless man - I can't be sure he was homeless because he was pushing a cart, but he was dressed shabbily and smelled kind of funny, not that we smelled good by then - anyway this maybe-homeless guy motioned us over to this sheltered spot under the escalator. He even showed Steve where he could plug in his phone to charge.

By then the kids thought it was 7am and were wide awake, even as Steve and I fell asleep in the middle of sentences. We visited the bathroom 36 times. There were roaches the size of large mice crawling around the floor we were trying to get the kids to sleep on.

Once we checked in to our morning flight, the rest of the trip was great. Except that they totally lied about our luggage, which I am sure is still sitting somewhere at JFK. It's not ALL Delta I hate. It's specifically JFK Delta people.

Seriously, I am tired and still smarting from the burn, but I think they cancelled flights because they were not full. I think they lied to give the crew on the plane that didn't fly a full shift. I think they lied about the luggage outright and I think they needed better vouchers for cabs but especially hotels. I mean, they didn't need to offer. But the hotel didn't exist.

I'm going to go rest now. I shall post tomorrow about the lovely vacation we took.