Alright, look. I don't really know where to start here, but somehow I will get this out. I recently just returned from a fabulous vacation in the lovely city of Jacksonville, FL and had a wonderful time. Visiting some family and basking in the Florida sun (and rain) was one of the best vacations I've had in a while. Possibly ever if you count a vacation as only being when you actually go away from where you live for an extended amount of time. The action fired up as soon as we arrived and didn't let up until the minute I returned to Phoenix. Let me just list a couple of the events and you will understand: NASCAR race in Daytona, fishing for anything that would eat a shrimp in the ocean (sharks), eating seafood by the pound, swimming in the immaculate Atlantic Ocean, watching fireworks in the channel by St. Augustine on a boat... You get where I'm going here, it was nuts. I barely remember sleeping there was so much going on. Only 2 things happened that brought this trip to its knees: the flight to Jacksonville, and the return flight home to Phoenix.
Let's start with the flight to Jacksonville, it's amazing how 1 airline practically intentionally tries to ruin your trip singlehandedly. So we depart at 6:05 a.m. which means we arrive at Sky Harbor at approximately 4:30 a.m. You feel like you walk into the set of a zombie movie when entering this airport at this hour. I'm pretty sure no one's really awake there, they are just going through the motions. Surprisingly doing the early check-in has benefited us and we are through security with bags checked by 4:45 and are waiting for the flight which is ON TIME. Score, who said this trip was going to be full of peril? Nothing like catching the first flight of the day out of this frying pan.
So we're all standing around waiting for the first set of the "elite" passengers to board when I glance over and see a woman with a small baby walking my way. She's on her own this flight, and has that smile on her face like "my baby is the coolest thing since sliced bread, why don't you all look at him and comment on how precious he is". This did not bother me because I'm sure some day I will have a kid and will want the whole world to see him/her. So she decides to walk over to within about 5 feet of me and waits to board, no big deal... I glance back over one more time as she makes some googly talk to the baby, mainly because I was laughing at her talk when I was blind sided by the mother of all awkwardness. The broad was breast feeding like she was the only one in the airport. Now ladies, breast feeding is no doubt a very necessary/critical whatever you want to call it way of feeding a newborn child hands down. But have you no shame woman?! If you want to make a dude feel awkward in a public scenario, start breast feeding your kid with no cover. Sure there's the perverts that probably think it's awesome, but even they have to ask themselves "Is this right?" Are you trying to attract the perverts? Do you not realize what you're doing here? Cover it up! I can't think of anything close that compares with what I could do that would be in parallel with this except throwing my pants down in the corner of the terminal and going #1. Who wants to see that? Yeah I know it's a boob, but we don't have to be dirtbags everywhere we go, right? Ladies, don't expose yourself to the filth of the world like that!
It gets worse, guess who sits down in the same row as me on the opposite side of the aisle. You guessed it. My first thought was, "well at least she got the feeding out of the way before she boarded". Nope, she wasn't even close to done. She had a 3 hour flight and she was planning on using ALL of the flight time wisely. As soon as the plane got to elevation and the captain made the electronics are OK announcement, she was back at it before I could plug my headphones into my phone to listen to the Avett Brothers. It took every ounce of me to not say "COME ON LADY!" The guy next to her was really enjoying it though and no he wasn't traveling with her. I just closed my eyes and tried to sleep like a sardine sleeps in a sardine can for the rest of the flight. I'm sure you can imagine me sitting in coach on a 757 Boeing. It's not the most normal sight you've ever seen. Only 3 hours and I was in Atlanta, 3/4 of the way to vacation!
I'm not sure that everyone knows this, but I read a fun little tidbit that said that the Atlanta airport (Hartsfield-Jackson International) is the busiest airport in the world. Don't ask me why, but upon arriving I would not disagree. There's 5 terminals and an underground tram/walkway that takes you to each different terminal. At least it was easy to lose the breast feeder... We arrived at terminal C and luckily had to work our way up to terminal B. A short 5 minute walk, plenty of time to spare. Upon arriving to our gate in the B terminal, we realize we have plenty of time as they are just now unloading passengers off of the arriving flight from La Guardia that will take us to JAX. Thank goodness, everyone had time to go pee. The first thing the gate attendant says over the intercom is "We are unloading the passengers now, and the mechanical staff is on board trying to diagnose an issue, we should be taking off approximately 30 minutes after our scheduled takeoff." Ok, if you tell me that mechanics are investigating an issue on a plane I'm about to get on, you're not doing me any favors. First of all, you don't want to tell them to hurry up because that would be bad. Secondly, I do not want to watch a bunch of wrench monkeys work on my plane and keep me in the busiest airport in the world any longer than need be. This is where you realize the mechanics might have the crappiest job in the airport. You can't win for losing. Oh well, at least I had a little time to charge up my now nearly dead phone. Little did I know my phone would be fully charged before we left that god forsaken airport.
An hour and a half AFTER we were supposed to take off, amazingly the plane's pilot comes out and decides to give us his 5 cents worth. He begins explaining how there's an air control module that shifts oxygen from one side of the plane to the other in an emergency situation and blah blah blah.. We get the point man, we want that fixed before it takes off. Low and behold, they've already replaced the part and it's still not functioning properly. This does not bode well. We should have been in JAX by now feeding our faces with shrimp and scallops. He thanks us for being patient, as always like we have a choice, and goes back to the plane. The anxious crowd continued on watching the wrench monkeys stare at the under belly of the plane pointing and gawking surely just putting on a show for us passengers at this point. They know they're not fixing this plane soon. Come on, man!
About 40 minutes later, the gate attendant tells us they are fairly certain this plane isn't going anywhere and they have started looking for a different plane for us to take to JAX. There's a novel concept, odds are in our favor as the ATL is one of Delta's main hubs. Just pull another one out of the hangar and let's rock! Easier said than done, I know. All of a sudden it was like a stampede of water buffalo running from a pride of lions from gate B01 to B24. The attendant tells us they have found a plane and we'll be boarding at that gate heading to JAX. Thank you, 3 hours later... So we get to B24 and it's not an "end of the terminal" gate, just one of your standard side pocket gates for lack of a better term. Talk about shoving 10 lbs. of fat into a 5 lb. bag. Now 300 people are swarmed around this gate like a lynch mob. Our new lovely gate attendant tells us that we will be boarding shortly as soon as the crew gets to the new plane and does their pre-flight checks. Let's do this! About 30 minutes later, the gate attendant tells us they've lost the crew and are "looking for them". How the @&%* does this happen?! They were on a broken plane sitting there all by themselves. Did they sneak out the back door on the dining truck? That's what I would have done...
Ten minutes later, the crew comes walking up and it appeared as if the crowd was ready to stone them all. The captain decides to get on the intercom for one last brief update. "Yeah ladies and gentlemen, sorry about that but they decided not to inform the crew that we were switching planes so we've been sitting on the broken plane for the last half hour wondering what's been going on. Sorry about that!" Hey nice job Delta! Talk about putting the cart before the horse, they almost got a crew killed that afternoon. Shortly after that we boarded and were in the air arriving in JAX at 5:30 as opposed to 2:30 as scheduled.
And this was just the flight TO the lovely town of Jacksonville. More to come in tomorrow's blog on the return nightmare flight home...
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