Lived to tell about it

Dr. Mystery and I have returned from our sordid week of overeating, under-sleeping, super-conferencing, and excessive sweating in our nation's capital. I'm working on slowly uploading the 178 pictures that we collectively took to my Flickr page, and once they are all up there I'll give you the fully illustrated run down.

But before I get to the good stuff, let me vent my frustrations about our return flight which is aptly summed up in the photo above:

First our DC to Dallas flight makes an emergency landing in Memphis. We later find out that all of the engines had failed except one. After waiting an hour and a half for a new plane, we reboard in Memphis and then inexplicably sit on the runway for 35 minutes. Finally we take off and make it to Dallas five minutes after the last flight leaves for Austin. Bleh.

We get shuttled off to a "nearby" hotel with hotel vouchers from American to pay for our rooms. They don't give us any food vouchers (and also didn't give us anything to eat on the plane -- not even some pretzels), so we are all really hungry. At 11:30, after a 25 minute ride to the hotel on a shaky and overcrowded airport bus we proceed to stand in line for 20 minutes while they check everyone in. When we get to the front of the line, they tell us that the 4:40 am shuttle to the airport is full, even though that is the one we need to catch to make our 6:15 flight to Austin. They say we can pay for our own taxi to the airport if we want. We write our names down anyway and decide to just get to the lobby super early and squeeze our way onto the shuttle.

Our hotel is this wildly over-rated Holiday Inn in Bedford, Texas. When we get up to our room we find a ton of ants in the bathroom, a toilet that won't flush, a rattley air conditioner that won't turn off, patched and peeling wallpaper, only five channels out of the promised 15 on the TV work, and we got put into a room with two uncomfortable twin beds instead of a coupley king. And the coffee-maker was in the bathroom. Gross. Particularly since this was a not-very-clean ant-infested bathroom with a broken toilet. Of course, we were only in the room for about four hours before we had to pack up and head back downstairs.

Then, when we finally get back to DFW, I get a really rude ticket agent who tells me that her computer says my ticket has already been used and I went back to Austin the night before. That totally makes sense because I really love sneaking back to the Dallas airport the next morning and trying to take another flight to Austin just to really screw with the airlines. Then she accuses me of losing or hiding some kind of paperwork that she says I must have but that no one ever gave me. I dig out everything in my purse, explain that I only had three hours of sleep and that the whole reason I'm here at 5:00 in the morning is because of her airline, and she just keeps asking me for some mysterious papers and telling me there is nothing she can do. Dr. Mystery and I totally lose our cool (this is exhibited when Dr. M starts banging on the counter and cussing and I start crying). The tears seemed to work and she gave me my boarding pass and then patronizingly pointed me to the cafe "in case I was hungry" and called me honey which really made me mad.

Finally we got on the plane and got back to our apartment around 7:30 on Sunday morning.

I'm glad that they made an emergency landing if the equipment was failing. Honestly, all that trouble was better than being in a plane crash. But I'm mad that they didn't do anything for all the passengers to make up for their problem besides put us up in a shitty hotel and yell at us at the ticketing desk. I'm not really a complainer, but I think I'm going to write a letter about this.

And stay the hell out of Bedford, if you know what's good for you.