Isn’t there a phrase that says, “What can go wrong, will go wrong?” Maybe, maybe not, but it certainly felt like it when we tried to leave the country! First, our flight was cancelled so we had to wait two days to leave. Then the flight was quite full, so we didn’t get dealt the best seats. I will never understand who came up with the four-seat row. Two people get stuck in the middle… how uncomfortable! The flight itself was uneventful and went by fairly quickly. Casey and I were able to sleep decently, so that was a relief. When we landed in New York, the other passengers wouldn’t let us get off the plane, even though we were in the front of the plane. They just kept coming and wouldn’t give us room to step into the aisle. Casey eventually had to yell “WAIT!” so they’d let us out. We hurried to customs because we had a flight to catch, but the line was super long. A lot of other flights had just landed, so we couldn’t rush through the line. Finally, we reached the end and moved on to baggage claim, but our bags took forever coming out! The carousel kept stopping too, for reasons which I’m not aware of.
After waiting for a long time, we got our bags and hurried to the AirTrain, only to find that it wasn’t operating in the direction we wanted to go! What’s up with that?! We were in Terminal 4, the international terminal, and we wanted to go to Terminal 3 for Delta. That’s one stop in one direction, but the tram would only go in the opposite direction. We asked an employee what the easiest way to get to T3 was and he said to walk, so out we went into the cold, lightly jogging to keep ourselves warm and to get there quicker. We hurried into the terminal and were greeted with more bad news. They wouldn’t let us get on the flight! We still had about fifteen minutes before it departed, but that wasn’t enough time to check our bags, and they wouldn’t let us send the bags on a later flight. We had to go with our bags, so we missed the flight. Nooooo! It was so disappointing. The next flight left in 2.5 hours, but it was full, so we booked ourselves on the flight leaving in 8 hours. Meh!
Did I mention it was Thanksgiving?? Yes, this American holiday wasn’t greeting us very warmly. The ticketing agent was nice though and put us on standby for the earlier flight, just in case there were no-shows. We took our time getting through security (which was very quick) and got some breakfast. Then we made our way to the gate and waited a couple hours for the standby flight… which we didn’t get to go on. Sigh. We barely missed it too, but they overbooked by one. So… we waited… 6 hours… for the next flight. The one fortunate thing was that we were together. Two years go, I visited Casey in Lagos for Christmas, and I had to fly back by myself on New Year’s Eve. I missed my connecting flight to Las Vegas as well, and I had to sit in the airport for 9 hours, alone. It was terrible! I didn’t have my cell phone charger, and I could not find a charging station for the life of me! On the verge of tears, I finally found an electronics store but they didn’t have the kind of charger I needed. Two, nice employees gave me one that they were using and I was so relieved. After that experience, I was much happier to wait in the airport with someone!
We sat in the Delta SkyMiles lounge and relaxed for a few hours, then got something to eat, and eagerly boarded our plane. That flight went by kind of slowly. Maybe we were just anxious to arrive. FINALLY, WE MADE IT! My mom was waiting for us at baggage claim, and it was so wonderful to see her! We hugged, grabbed our bags, and went home to enjoy a warm, Thanksgiving dinner. (We had already missed the big meal the day before when my sister and brother-in-law were in town, but this meal was lovely nonetheless.) Exhausted but excited, CnL finally made it to Vegas.
CnLsnapping 