just my luck

Time for another travel anecdote. This is just too precious not to blog about.

This week I was in Toronto (again), and had to get to upstate NY by Thursday night for a Friday morning demo. Thursday was an enjoyable day (started that way, anyway) until I got to the Toronto airport. I find out upon arrival that my flight to Philadelphia was cancelled due to crappy weather. I spend the next 40 minutes alternately in line, talking to the USAir rep at the counter (who was harried and dramatic but nice and ultimately very helpful), and my travel department via phone. We all decide that my best way to get to where I'm going (Newburgh, NY), I should re-route through Detroit, which means a Canada Air flight to Detroit and a Delta/NorthWest into Stewart Field.

The plane from Toronto was SO SMALL (all together now: "how small was it?"), I'm fairly certain that I've driven land vehicles larger than it. The old deuce and a halfs in the army, our ladder truck in the fire department...seriously, they were larger. But the flight was ok, and all was good until I got off of the plane and into the terminal. My first clue that something was amiss was that my flight to Newburgh wasn't showing on any of the display screens. I deduced that I was in the "D" terminal, and looked for a map. All of the maps I found only showed the D terminal. So after walking what seemed like a half mile or so, I finally found a TSA agent and asked her where the NW flights were. "Oh, chile', you in the WRONG TERMINAL for NorthWest!", she practically laughed at me. There was no depiction of other terminals in the map! Then she started to give me directions: "take that exit over there, up the escalator, across the bridge, down the escalator, onto the shuttle bus for 3 miles -" at which point I interrupted and said, "Whoooaaaahhhhh, wait a minute: there's a shuttle involved?"

"Yes, chile', a SHUTTLE.", laughing again. "You in the NORTH Terminal right now." Her reaction to my reaction was so funny, I had to laugh despite the whole thing.

So I thank her and set out on the first part of the journey. Mind you, I'm carrying my laptop, and a carry-on bag that contains miscellaneous crap and my purse, which is heavy. Usually I have my rollaboard, which I balance all this weight on. Because of all the recent travel I've been doing, my back has been hurting, and I find that pulling a heavy rollaboard and bench-pressing it over my head 2x a day doesn't seem to help that pain, so I checked it. Yes, I checked my bag. (For the non-road warriors reading this, this practice is unheard of amongst my people. It is widely assumed that any checked bag will get lost in transit. This is common knowledge among seasoned travelers, yet, the pain -and tiny airplane size- compelled me to do it anyway.)

NOTE TO DETROIT: When you have a terminal that is 3 miles away from the other terminals, it is not the 'North' terminal. It is a different airport.

So the shuttle drops me off about another half-mile past the counter (at the other airport) I need to check in at, where they once again confirm that my bag has been checked all the way through to NY. I make it through security AGAIN (shoes off, laptop out, liquids out, show ID and boarding pass, repack it all again), and look at another map. I am in terminal A, but need to be in terminal C. The map tells me I have to go through an underground tunnel that looks very loooooong to get to where I need to be. No shuttle for this one, just some moving sidewalks. *Sigh*.

But the thoughtful architects and designers of Detroit's airport made it so delightfully trippy-looking, I almost forgot about my throbbing vertebrae. Almost. The pic above was a rushed iPhone pic that I snapped, but basically it's a long-ass tunnel that has morphing colors and lights and some weird music/sound effect things going on. I kept looking for a man behind a curtain, it was very Wizard of Oz. But eventually I got to the other side, and had to take various other escalators to finally get to my gate, and the plane boarded not 5 minutes later.

I was thinking, 'hmmm...I barely made it...I sure hope my bag is hauling ass over here too.'. That was more of a premonition than a thought, I think. I started doing a mental inventory of just how bad it would be if my bag didn't make it to NY at the same time as me. The worst part is that some of my telephony equipment for my demos was in there. Usually I keep all my demo tools with me, but the tel product is secondary to my demo usually, and takes up a lot of space and weight, so it didn't make the short-list for my carry-on bags.

Eventually my flight makes it to NY, and predictably, my bag doesn't. I have to wait for 15 minutes at the Delta counter for the lone Delta employee to get there, run the trace, and tell me what I already knew: it didn't make the connection in Detroit. Mr. Delta informs me that my bag should be landing tomorrow around 11:15, which is 15 minutes after the time I need to be in front of the customer. I tell him to just keep the bag at the airport, I'll pick it up on my way home. He gives me a Delta dopp kit as a consolation prize - toothbrush, soap, detergent, and a t-shirt. I actually hoped that the t-shirt would say something funny like, "Delta lost my bag and all I got was this lousy t-shirt", but no such luck. It has a modest logo that says, "Skyteam". Yeah, 'cause I'm really rooting for them at this point. Yay, Skyteam. Go, Skyteam, Go.

I have to wait another 15 minutes for the shuttle to my hotel, which is luckily (?) near a 24 hr Wal-Mart. So I'm going to sleep now, so I can get up at the crack of dawn to go SUIT SHOPPING at WALMART. Yes, I'm cringing too. Couldn't it have at least been a Target? Ugh. I need a decent outfit and shoes. Keep your fingers crossed for that one.

I picked up some Tylenol (I) for a friend while I was in Canada - it's a low dose of codeine that's available without a prescription - if I wasn't so worried about oversleeping, I'd be busting into that bottle right about now to quiet down this throbbing achy back of mine. I'll stick to good ol' Advil and hope it works.