Little Bus of Horrors

Christmas with the family is always stressful. Flying over the holidays is both expensive and a pain in the ass. Add to that snow, the wrong airport, and my amazing woman and you’ve got the perfect stress-inducing weekend with an amazing woman. This story begins around 15min prior to our cab to IAD. I picked up the printed tickets my D had printed and glanced down to see our departure city…Baltimore. DOH! Sometimes you make small assumptions when printing tickets purchased 6 months previously, and flying out of Dulles was one of ours. D threw down her makeup and we immediately loaded the car and took off for BWI. It was a stressful 45min trip, for her. I always plan to be at the airport extremely early so I knew we had a big enough cushion. As it turns out we made it through TSA with nearly an hour to spare. Crisis averted for now.

Of course, as a running theme when traveling with D, the trip back didn’t fare so well. I’m sure you heard about the snow on ATL on Christmas, well that wasn’t the problem for us. We had a connection through MEM and they were just fine that day…until two hours before our flight.

Arriving at the airport we found our flight had been canceled. In an amazingly unorthodox move, Delta rebooked us through O’Hare on United to get us home on time. Our new flight was an extra hour later so we bellied up to the empty bar to down a few drinks and shoot the shit with a hilarious bartender. The flight got off without a hitch and we arrived in Chicago with an hour before our connecting flight’s departure.

Like I said, we arrived on time…but we didn’t deplane for 45+min. First we had to await an open gate, that took 30min. Then we needed stairs…then we needed stairs that fit our plane…and finally we could disembark. Since our connection was on another terminal, our haste was futile so we just abandoned hope and found the United desk.

I still had a small glimmer of hope for getting home Christmas night… I’d used the free (HT: Google) in-flight wifi to check all flights between O’Hare and BWI for the rest of the evening and there was one chance. American Airlines had a flight one hour out to DCA. I hopped on the phone to United while we stood in line. The rep quickly found this flight and began rebooking me *CLICK* Silence. Redial. New agent. Rebooking. Sitting on hold as they call American to transfer our flight. Hold. Hold. Hold. 45min later as the operator and counter clerk both redial American the counter clerk gets through. The flight just finished boarding. Too late.

Fortunately, United was still in a spirit of giving. They provided us with hotel and food vouchers for the night and rebooked us on a 6AM flight to BWI. Early enough to miss the nor’easter that was approaching the region.

As we finally made it to the bus stop for the hotel (O’hare is huge) we had a nice long wait ahead of us. It seemed the bus driver had taken dinner prior to our arrival because we waited nearly an hour for him to arrive. At least we could wait inside in the warmth of the bus terminal until the bus finally arrived. Of course, this is where the real fun began.

We were fortunate enough to hop on the bus (shuttle) first and grabbed the front row of seats (first off, first checked in). It filled up fairly quickly, and as the last guy boarded, he commented to a woman sitting several rows back, “You know, you could put your bags under the shuttle to open that seat.” Oh boy…

Woman: I can put my luggage where I want.
Guy 1: Wow, that’s rude, someone could use that seat.
Woman: Don’t tell me what to do!
Guy 1: You’re a bitch.
Woman: Don’t call me that! There are children on here! Watch your language!
Guy 1: Fuck you, bitch.
Woman: Fuck you! Don’t call me a bitch you asshole!
Guy 2: Hey! Watch your language!
Woman: Fuck you, you’re just picking on me because you think I’m a weak woman without my husband.
Guy 1/2 (mixes together, really): No, there are children on board.
Woman: If my husband were here you wouldn’t be picking on me! You’re just picking on me because I’m alone! What kind of man are you?
Guy 1/2: Oh shut up!
…It goes on like this the entire…fucking…trip… We seriously thought there was going to be a fist fight, it was insane!  Note that it is CHRISTMAS DAY! Freaking CHRISTMAS! These three people were going at each other’s throats!  We were just glad to get to our hotel (this particular bus delivered to three) and get the fuck away from the crazies (I went for the front desk so fast I snapped the revolving door panel out of place! hah!).

Needless to say, it was nice to get checked in, grab some free food (french onion soup served in a freaking onion!) and get a couple hours of sleep.