Last Monday evening the Wasden gang loaded onto a plane for a surprise family trip (in honor of Peter's return after a two-year absence) to Orlando to hang out at Universal Studios' Harry Potter Land for three days! Our flight was scheduled to leave around 7pm. We boarded around 6:40. The plane started to taxi, and three hours later, we were still taxiing, durn the durn fog. There were about 30 planes ahead of us in line, the wind was two knots over the allowable limit for takeoff, planes that needed to land were being given priority because they were low on fuel, the air conditioning was turned off for taxi, the flight attendants were yelling over the intercom for people to stay in their seats (apparently the law is that while taxiing, everyone must remain seated, even though little children and some adults have apricot-sized bladders and really hadn't planned on taxiing for three hours), and we were within minutes of reaching the legal time limit that passengers can be on a plane without taking off. Emotions were running a little high, to say the least.
At long last, we were rerouted to a different runway, the wind died down, the rain stopped, the planes ahead of us in line timed out and were forced to return to the terminal and wait for another flight, and we were free to leave. All the passengers cheered and applauded and we were on our way to Florida before we knew it, albeit three hours later than planned. At least there was no traffic at that point?
The next few days were fun-filled although boiling hot. Harry Potter Land (is that even what it's called?) was a lot of fun and really cool, but too small. Maybe I'll blog about HP Land separately another time.
Thursday afternoon we dragged ourselves to the airport again for our 4:30 flight. We got there maybe two hours early. Around four o'clock they announced the flight was delayed an hour. Awesome. An hour later, they announced it was delayed another hour. The next announcement informed us that La Guardia airport was closed indefinitely to all flights due to inclement weather. Yep.
I think it was around 10pm when we heard a boarding call for a flight to LGA. We raced from the Delta lounge we were lucky enough to be able to crash and ran to the terminal. It was sort of like this:
The flight wasn't ours, but we were optimistic that ours would soon be leaving too. They told us that our flight wasn't ready to leave yet because our crew had timed out and we were waiting for another crew so that we could leave. Another hour later, the lady at the desk told us that there was a chance the flight might be cancelled if they couldn't find another crew. At that point, the people who had been waiting since 3:30 that afternoon with screaming babies and rowdy children and whatever else had had enough.
People stood and waved their arms, people rushed the desk, audible "Aw come on!" "You've got to be kidding me!" "What??!?" etc could be heard in the except-for-us empty terminal. There was one guy who had the screamiest baby for the past four hours (I shall call him hereafter "wifebeater" because he was wearing one) who started slamming the desk and yelling "You have to communicate with us! We have children!" The woman at the desk sounded very emotional when she spoke. A few people gave up and left. Then the Orlando Police showed up (well, three of them anyway). At that point, the woman at the desk announced the flight was cancelled. It was shortly before midnight. The crowd yelled and roared. People left in droves. I heard an angry men yell "Come on, let's get out of here!" in a voice of death. After a few minutes, most people were focused on yelling at the woman at the desk to get them on another flight. A group of thirteen-year-olds on a basketball team or something gathered the rest of the similarly-aged kids in the terminal and started some sort of stomping/clapping/chanting dance circle that was obnoxiously loud. Just as Wifebeater had gathered his brood and started to head out, the crew from our flight, who had been clocked in the entire time, high-tailed it out of the terminal. He chased after them yelling "Oh now you decide to show up? Blah blah blah obsecenities and such!" But the police gave him the eye, and he quit.
We had to spend the night at a random hotel (and got the very last two rooms they had) and sat around all day until an afternoon flight that honestly I don't even remember taking. La!
PS Can I say how proud of myself I am right now? Saturday I went over to help some people organize/clean/unpack in their new house. My task, besides sweeping and vacuuming, was to organize the kids' playroom. It was a bombsite beforehand (the movers had classily dumped everything from the boxes onto the floor, and a lot of it wasn't even toy-related, ie toiletries, underwear, electronics, what??), and the before picture shows the mom's initial attempt at organization. The after shows the results from my five hours' hard and continuous work. And all those tubs were disorganized and had to be dumped out and redone. So you know. I can't stop looking at these pictures. It makes me feel so awesome. And I got paid $75 for it!
