How to Not Get to Seattle

As I write this I am supposed to be on an airplane headed northwest to Seattle. Instead, I am at home contemplating just how easily plans can be disrupted.

My flight was supposed to leave BWI at 6:40pm. I left work at 245pm. Even with awful traffic, I would still get there in plenty of time. Of course, traffic was just that: awful. A trip that should have taken 45 minutes, and certainly no more than an hour took nearly two hours equating to an average speed of about 20 miles an hour. Still, I was paranoid about traffic and got to the airport about 4:30. It was about 5pm by the time I parked and took the shuttle bus over to the terminal.

I check my bag and get my boarding pass, get my dose of being made to feel like a criminal going through security and then I’m on to the gate. At this point, I learned my flight is 50 minutes late. No problem because Kaitlyn was running even later than I was and that would give her a bit more time to make it. She did eventually arrive at the gate just as they were finally getting the 2:30pm flight out only about four hours late or so.

Of course then they announce that our plane coming from Boston was late leaving and isn’t even going to arrive until 7:50pm and is scheduled to leave at 8:15pm. It has now become impossible to make the connecting flight to Seattle. Since I was going for th weekend, it didn’t seem worthwhile to lose 14 hours until I would get there so I got a refund and asked for my luggage back. Kaitlyn was going for a week and has to be there so she’s scheduled to go out tomorrow evening.

We are told it will be 30-40 minutes until our luggage is ready to pick up so we stop off and have a drink and gab. We go to pick up our luggage and hers is there but mine isn’t. Half an hour of waiting and it becomes clear that my luggage got on the plane even though I didn’t. I hope my bag enjoys Seattle. I’m wondering just how long it will take AirTran to get it back to me.

To make it worse, it rained like mad on the drive back home with visibility dropping to barely drivable levels at some points.

So much for flying out of BWI to save a few dollars compared to flying out of Dulles. Actually, I guess I did save a few dollars since I didn’t get to fly at all. But I did get the joy of sitting in traffic for nearly two hours, wading through airport security, filling out lost baggage forms, and driving back through a deluge. How much more fun can any one evening hold?