traveling woes

For me Friday the 29th of June, 2007 will be a day that goes down as one of the worst in recent memory. Since I'm trying to get over it I won't pour out all the details for you but as a day it just sucked. There was a mishap leading up to my departure from New Zealand that was stressful and frustrating but it was nothing compared to what happened to me after I got to the Auckland International Airport. While I thought I was arriving at the airport some five hours early for check-in (due to the aforementioned mishap) I found out upon arrival that I had actually missed my flight by about four hours!

Now I'm pretty sure that I'm not stupid. My I.Q. score tells me I'm not. The fact that I graduated from an intense Master's program with honors tells me I'm not. My professors, mentors, and friends have even assured me in the past that I'm not. On Friday however I must have accidentally taken and idiot pill or something. Actually I blame this whole incident on my ADD, which is probably an attempt to play the victim but whatever. So anyway, for some reason when I read my ticket, "105P" looked just like "1050P" which means that I thought my flight was leaving at 10:50 PM when it actually left at 1:05 PM. Mind you, I checked the time on my ticket several times just to confirm the time (which is why I blame ADD) but for some reason my brain initially locked in the time as 10:50 PM and so that's what time I read it as on each subsequent check.

After realizing that I wasn't going to puke, though I felt like it, I promptly tried to resolve the issue. Long story short, unless I wanted to wait to be re-booked on July 6 I had to buy a new one way ticket from a different airline. Longer story short, due to the immensely generous donation of frequent flyer miles from one of our supporters I was originally supposed to be flying home in a really nice seat but instead I ended up spending a lot of money on what the lady at check-in counter assured me was the worst seat on the plane.

After a 12 hour flight of extreme discomfort and miserable self-loathing I arrived in Los Angeles an hour after my flight back to St. Louis left. All the way there I knew this would happen but I was thinking, "No problem. It's L.A. and there have to be multiple flights to St. Louis each day." Now I was right in my assumption but what I didn't know was that due to weather issues a bunch of flights were cancelled and delayed and every remaining flight to St. Louis had massive stand-by lists. Another long story short, I ended up spending the a total of over 17 hours and one mostly sleepless night in LAX. The two pictures of the empty airport may not seem that major but keep the following text borrowed from the LAX entry on Wikipedia in mind:

LAX handles more "origin and destination" (i.e. not connecting) passengers than any other airport in the world. It is the
world's fifth-busiest airport by passenger traffic [2] and sixth-busiest by cargo traffic, serving some 60 million passengers
and more than two million tons of freight in 2004. It is the busiest airport in the state of California, and the third-busiest
airport by passenger traffic in the United States. In terms of international passengers, LAX is the second-busiest in the U.S.
(behind only JFK International Airport in New York City) [3] , and 20th worldwide.

That same airport is the one that is completely empty in these photos. I felt a little like Tom Hanks in The Terminal. So anyway, I finally made it home and while I'm still kicking myself I am getting over it. Believe it or not there were a lot of details about the day that I could obsess over which I haven't included because I'm trying to move on. In retrospect, when I consider everything that went down at the aiport in Glasgow on Friday I guess I don't have much to complain about. Especially since my bad day was almost completely my fault. Now I just have to deal with the jet lag. Check back in a few days for some more photos of my trip to New Zealand.