1/28/09

Minneapolis/St. Paul airport

Today's been one of those crazy airport days. It's 5pm and I've been at this airport since 9:30am. And I'm not leaving (or scheduled to leave) until 9:20pm. Here's why: This morning we were supposed to fly out of Columbus to Regina, SK Canada with a layover in Minneapolis. Columbus got hit with wintery weather last night and today, so yesterday evening Steve called everyone to let us know we may be leaving that night instead of risking a cancelled or delayed flight out of Columbus this morning. We all met at the shop around 7pm and went to the airport to rent a couple of cars. Then we drove to Detroit so we could catch a flight out of there the next morning. We made it to Detroit through all the snow and stayed at a hotel for about 2 hours. We arrived around 1am and had to drive to the airport at 4am. We were going to catch our original flight out of Minneapolis to Canada at 6:40.

So we get to the airport, drop off the cars and check in. A few people had already checked in for the original flight out of Columbus, and that caused some problems. We were there for close to an hour before they got everything straightened out. We had just enough time to walk to our gate and use the restroom before the plane started boarding. Then we were waiting and waiting to leave the gate when the pilot said they had to fix some computer problem for the flight attendants and there was also some discrepancy between how much fuel they were told was in the plane and how much was actually there. They had "enough to get us where we were going," but there was just some paper work they had to get done for all of that. Then after all that was done we were waiting in line to get de-iced. I don't know exactly how long we sat there because I was drifting in and out of sleep, but it was at least an hour.

Because of all of that we missed our next flight out of Minnesota. A lot of people missed their flights, so when we got off the plane they had new iteneraries printed. Only our new flight was scheduled for tomorrow. We neeeded to be in Canada tonight because we start working tomorrow morning. So finally Steve got it worked out to where 5 people flew to Winnepeg at 11, then to Regina, and the remaining 4 flew straight to Regina at 9:20 tonight. So after all of that was straigtened out we all got some lunch (it was the first we had eaten all day). The group of 5 went to wait for their flight which got delayed an hour. The rest of us went looking for a place to "set up camp" for the next 9 hours.

We found a little lounge on the second floor of the main concourse and that's where we've been all day. Marnell has been working on e-mails and phone calls. Brian, Brandon and I slept a little, walked around, I watched/listened to my iPod, and they read.

The four of us got first class seats, so that will be nice. That will be first for me. The situation has been annoying, but considering all the circumstances things have worked out pretty well. Our original flight out of Columbus did end up getting cancelled, so we did the rigth thing by driving to Detroit. I just hope this last one to Canada goes ok. I need sleep!