Our flight was suppose to take off at 7:00, right? So we get to the airport around six, check in, and find our gate. By the way, we're not leaving from RDU, but some dinky (no offense) little airport in Greensboro, so we're 2 hours from home. And the travel agent tells us that there's a two hour delay because of bad weather in Fort Lauderdale, where our plane is coming from, so the plane hasn't even left to come get us yet. Ok, well, that sucks, but two hours is bearable, so we set our stuff down and eat something in this little mini- Pizza Hut (which ended up giving all of us extremely horrible stomach problems!). I have my camera and am taking random pics and videos, which I plan putting on Facebook later because I'm documenting our trip.
So two hours goes by and after sitting and such and being bored and tired (because I got three hours of sleep the night before) they inform us that the plane still hasn't taken off yet due to weather, so it won't get to us until 11:30, take off at 12 a.m., and get us to the airport at one in the morning. At one in the morning, the car rental isn't open, which would leave me and my family stranded at this tiny Florida airport and hour away from our hotel in the wee hours of the morning. Not desirable. So we leave the airport and get a room at a hotel about 15 minutes away and plan to take the earliest flight out the next morning (6:15). The only problem is, the company (SkyBus) didn't want to refund our money and told us we'd have to pay for all new tickets. Dad was like, uhm, no, forget that crap, give us our money back or put us on that plane in the morning. So they said fine, you can take the morning flight for free.
Anyways, we take a shuttle bus to the hotel and go to sleep around 11:30, and get up the next morning at 4:30, so we can leave for the airport by 5 and get there at 5:15. Before going to bed the night before, dad called the hotel we were suppose to be staying at in Florida that night to see if we could get a refund on that room, too, since we couldn't stay there due to outside, uncontrollable circumstances. It turns out they didn't have our reservations, and even though we had already paid to stay there once we got to Florida, they didn't see us in their system. Which means if we could have managed to get there when we were suppose to, we wouldn't have had a place to stay. So that was bad and dad had to work all that out before bed.
Now, when we first checked into the hotel in Greensboro that night, we told the lady at the counter to write us down on a list that told the shuttle bus driver we needed to leave for the airport by five. So the next morning we're down in the lobby at five to five. And it just so happened that another person had needed to be taken to the airport, but had not told the lady to write his/her name down, so the shuttle driver took the other person instead of us, and we were stuck at this hotel and pretty much told we were going to miss the flight.
The driver made it back for us by 5:20 and we were in line to check in our bags by 5:30. But dad didn't have tickets for this flight, he only had our old tickets from the delayed flight. So he had to argue with the flight agent to give us new tickets. It took forever. We had pretty much assumed we were going home because everything was going wrong. But then, oh goodness! A man was able to change our tickets and they held the flight for us, because by this time it was 6:30. We had to run out onto the runway, escorted by those guys in orange vests and headgear, and ushered up a flight of steps and onto the plane. I felt pretty much like the president. One of our "ushers" said he was surprised the vice-president of the company hadn't sent out his personal plane to get us. I guess dad caused a bit of a ruckus.
And now we're here. *Phew*
