Anyone who was following my Travel Hell Saga (either on Twitter, Utterz or Google is not God) of my trip yesterday will be happy to know I did finally make it to my destination. My final destination yesterday was Little Rock Arkansas. I was to board a flight in Tulsa at 4:20pm to go to Memphis, TN and then another flight at 7:21om in Memphis to put me in Tulsa by 8:10pm. Easy Peasey.
Well, as I got my ticket at the Northwest self service Kiosk I see that my flight is listed as delayed. It doesn’t say till what time or anything, just delayed. So I had no where else to go I went through security and got a message from Allison telling me that my flight was delayed till 5:24pm, it would make my connection tight but doable.
However, none of the monitors in the airport reflected a delayed flight, and on the Tulsa airport website no sign of my flight being delayed, in fact when 4:20 came the boards changed to “boarding”.
That is odd since there were no gate agents and no plane. Finally gate agents arrived around 4:30 and started two lines, one for people who were going to Minneapolis (or somewhere) and the others going to Memphis. I figured that I was fine because I knew the flight was delayed and I could still make my connection so I didn’t get into line right away, big mistake. Tip #1 If you see a line forming at the gate counter get in it right away.
I finally made my way over to the counter and got in line I see that now the departure time is for 6:10pm and I would in no way make my connection. So I tried to find out online if there were other flights from Memphis to Little Rock. Unfortunately my computer was having a meltdown at the time and was of no use. (I apologize to everyone on on Entrecard for my lack of drops, my computer has not allowed multiple tabs to be open and I can’t get hardly any drops in at all.) Okay, back to the story.
As I am in line I call my manager and discuss the possibility of driving from Tulsa to Little Rock (it is only 4 hours and had I thought of doing that from the get go I would have been in Little Rock well before I was scheduled to leave the Tulsa airport in the first place.) Tip #2 If you are traveling multiple places look at a map. a 4 hour drive is much better than 8 hours in the airport.
I call our travel emergency line and the guy on the other end helps me through finding out if I can rent a car and drive and leave that car in Little Rock, after exhausting all the car companies it is a no go. So I get to the front of the line (which by the way was the end of the line too since I was so slow to get in it.) At the front of the line I am put on a flight from Tulsa to Chicago, Chicago to Little Rock on American Airlines. This would put me in Little Rock by 11:15pm. I take the ticket, go across the way to the American counter, am put on a flight from Tulsa to Dallas, Dallas to Little Rock that gets me to Little Rock by 11:00pm. Okay no biggie.
the flights are no problem, I get to Little Rock for 11:00pm drive to my hotel (minutes away) get in and turn on my computer (I did say it had a meltdown) because I had a demonstration today and wanted to make sure everything was okay.
Does this look alright to you?
About an hour later it had run through a bunch of checks and the computer was working okay. Time for bed.
A scant 5 1/2 hours later I was up refreshed and ready for a good day of demos.
