Now, back to the matter at hand: The trip home. This should have been the easy part, right? Get on a plane in Vegas. Change to a different plane in Denver. Arrive safely in OKC with little or no incident.
Maybe that's what would have happened if we'd flown on Frontier.
But we flew United.
Never again.
We should have known from the instant we arrived at McCarran airport that this was going to be one of those days. We had checked in online the day before, printed out our boarding passes, and just had the check our bags. Only when we logged into the self-service kiosk it told us our flight had been cancelled.
No problems, though. It had already transferred our tickets to a later flight and put us on standby for an earlier one. We hung around the standby gate and got on the early flight. Maybe the bad travel day was behind us.
Our captain took the scenic route over the Grand Canyon. Oh. My. Gods. It's huge! I know, duh. But still.
We approached Denver over the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies. Beautiful!
We arrived in Denver at gate B-25ish. We had seats on the late flight, but we were standby on an earlier flight again. We trudged all the way down to B-90 (yes, it's as far away as it seems) and hung out with a million other people. The early flight got delayed because of weather and they airport shut down during the lightning.
When we realized that we were #s 16 and 17 on the standby list we headed back up to B-49, where we had confirmed seats. Only when we got there we discovered that it had moved to B-39.
At B-39, the gate attendant informed us that, because of the airport closure, our pilot had landed in Pueblo, our flight crew was in Colorado Springs, and our plane was circling overhead. Well, okay, maybe we can-- Oops, our plane also landed in Pueblo. Maybe it could give the pilot a lift to Denver.
While our flight was delayed for hours, we saw lots of fun people in the airport. There was a lady dressed in a pink square dance dress, a guy with a blue mohawk, lots of soccer teams, and a giant group of high schoolers who had just come from a whitewater rafting trip.
We eventually got moved to another gate. And then another. And then the airport finally opened up and our plane arrived ... but it had a mechanical issue and had to be repaired. We got moved to another gate. They gave us a different plane. We were finally about to board.
My mom and I got in line, our boarding passes clutched in our fists. We were first up in our seating section. We handed the boarding passes to the gate attendant. She scanned it over the machine ... and then frowned.
She scanned again. And frowned again. And asked us to move aside.
Turns out, for some unknown feat of computer trickery we no longer had seats. It took a couple of volunteers for us to even make it on the flight.
Did we get an apology? No.
Did with get an explanation? No.
Did we get first class tickets for our trouble? Well, my mom did, actually. But it was completely by accident, I assure you.
In the end, we were en route for almost fourteen hours on a trip that should take no more than six. Sigh.
Next time I'm bringing clippers and a bottle of hair dye (3.0 oz or smaller, of course). I want to see how many people I can convice to try this look.
Hey, it's Denver. And I had six hours. I bet I get a couple takers.
Hugs,
TLC
* I think this qualifies as an amusing use of bold for emphasis.
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