smokerblog

A Terminal Condition

Kari and I recently returned from a lovely three-state vacation (five-state, if you count airport layovers): we attended Carol & Derek's lovely wedding in Wyoming, hiked in some mountains in Colorado, and visited Kari's parents in North Carolina. All in nine days.

It really was a great vacation, entirely enjoyable and relaxing...except for the very first day. We had planned to fly AirTran for the entire trip, mainly because they offered the best combination of reasonable fares and short layover times. We were going to land in Denver at 10:30 AM and enjoy a leisurely drive to Casper, WY for our friends' wedding on Friday. That, at least, was the plan.

Our flight was scheduled to leave Rochester early at around 6 AM and we got there just in time to get checked in, through security, and to the gate before they sealed up the plane. We settled into our seats anticipating the beginning of our vacation, only to have the captain inform us of an unresolvable difficulty with the plane's computer.

So, off we went, back into the airport where we waited for two hours while a ticket agent desperately tried to find us a connecting flight to Denver. Eventually, we were told we had to wait for a 1:15 PM flight connecting with a United flight out of Baltimore. We landed in Denver at around 7 PM, and by the time we got the rental car we realized that we'd be lucky to make it to our hotel by midnight, about 8 hours later than we'd planned.

We arrived at the hotel parking at 12:01 AM and, while checking in, noticed some drunken hackers playing with the hotel's internet router. We were too travel-fatigued to strike up a conversation with them at that point, but later we found out that they were also wedding guests and had enabled a wireless access node in the hotel for the duration of their stay. That's just one example of what you might find when a statistician and an engineer get married.

I should mention that despite the hassle, AirTran and their staff were very accommodating about the flight delay. We got a free lunch, an apology letter, and two full-fare vouchers for a future flight. So that wasn't so bad. Certainly not as bad as what happened to this guy.