not (yet) off to France
Five minutes before rushing out the door to catch a bus to the BART to the airport to take a plane to New York and then to Paris, to arrive there at 10am Saturday morning, I saw that I had a voicemail from a few minutes earlier (while I had been furiously cleaning and packing). I checked it, and discovered that our flight to New York had been canceled.
I was hoping this was a isolated incident, but turns out all flights into and out of New York are canceled today because there may be a snowstorm. Apparently, there’s nothing else available on American Airlines to Paris today (I wonder if things would have been different had I heard and answered the phone when they called), and they don’t rebook flights on other airlines due to weather. The earliest they could rebook us was on a flight leaving tomorrow (Saturday) at midnight arriving in Paris Monday morning at 8am—TWO DAYS LATER!!!
Argh.
Stephanie and I are not big planners (so we don’t have to reschedule much), but this kind of messes up our vision of the trip, and definitely bums us out in the near term because we were very very ready to go. So our three days in Paris have been shortened to a single day because we’ve already purchased tickets on the TGV down to Avignon on the 20th. This also means I probably won’t bump into Katie Melville as originally planned.
American did however extend our return reservation by two days, leaving from Paris on Sunday, April 1st now, instead of Friday, March 30. The upshot is that we might spend that final weekend in Paris. The downside is that we lose our recovery weekend, arriving back in San Francisco on Sunday night. Oh shucks.
So right now Stephanie has my big noise canceling headphones on, talking to her sister on her computer via SkypeOut for the first time, which I guess is kind of like being there already. I’m going to go make some bacon and eggs.
Update: After learning that our rescheduled midnight flight tomorrow puts us into Chicago at 5am Sunday morning and our flight to Paris leaves at 5pm (translation: 12 hour layover), Stephanie is currently on a mission to do something much more adventurous.
As it stands I believe we’ll be taking a bus (#27 or 47) to the Caltrain station, and then a train all the way down to San Jose tonight asap, then we’ll be taking some combination of bus+light rail to a Motel 6 outside the airport, so that we can get to the airport by 4:20am (aka the butt crack of dawn’s butt crack) for a 6:20am flight to Dallas (possibly first class), where we’ll hang out for 5 hours, before taking a 5pm flight to Paris, arriving at 8am Sunday morning, a day later than our original itinerary, but at least a day earlier than our rebooked itinerary. At the moment Stephanie is on the phone with the hotel in Paris via Skype, where it’s 1AM Saturday morning, trying to re-reserve the room we gave up for the night of the 18th.
Moral of the story: do not mess with a French girl on her way to France!
Update #2: after five hours in Dallas, we are still in Dallas. Plane was suppose to take off at 5:25pm, but instead we got a cryptic “the plane is out of operation, we don’t have any more details, so you might want to just wander around the airport and listen to the loudspeaker.” What?
Umm. Ok. A few minutes later there was a gate change, and now it’s 6:05 and the monitor says we’re departing at 6:25pm. I finally broke down and decided to waste $6 on a hour of wifi from T-Mobile.
The woman at the gate just announced that they’re giving out meal vouchers to anyone with a boarding pass. 6:25, yeah right. Hmm, I just might get some BBQ afterall.
Man that sucks. There *may* be a snowstorm so they are canceling *all* flights??? Ugh. Flying is such an ordeal these days. Why can’t they get anything together?
In an extraordinary convergence, the eurostar services have been suspended because of a fire in a through station. I am not going to france either.
Oh man Katie, that sucks too. How weird. Well, March 31, we’ll try to be in Paris.
Katie, well it looks like we’ll be getting into Paris by Sunday after all (see update) so if you can find a way to get to Paris, let us know.
Your mother says: When the Queen is happy the Kingdom is happy. In other words, don’t mess with the Queen!
May…hell we had 6 inches of snow I have the soaking boots to prove it. That is just the way it goes. Sorry it broke down and your flight got canceled, but these things happen.
Keep us posted. We’re waiting to hear where you are.