19 Jun 2023
This must be the year of Disney for Matt’s family- his brother and family did the parks earlier this year, and this week, his sister and family are hitting the parks as well. Even though theme parks totally aren’t my thing, since I had the week off, I figured I’d fly down, spend day at Epcot with them (eating tasty food!) and then spend a couple days exploring a few places I came across on my last trip to Orlando that I didn’t have time to check out.
Matt drove down late last week, but I worked this past weekend, so my plan was to fly out of our regional airport again. The only non-stop flight option was a late afternoon flight (1630), which gave me time to get caught up on a few things around the house and run a few errands before heading over to the airport.
I got to the airport an hour before boarding time and found security closed:
Huh. I feel like for a middle of the day flight, it should have been open by now, but I don’t mind being a bit early. Unfortunately, I hadn’t been there long when they announced a 2 hour delay for my flight. Shoot. I was already getting in late, now I won’t arrive until after 10pm. Add in an hour or so for the bus ride over… not a great start to the trip.
So I pulled out my laptop and started working on the ever-growing backlog of pictures. I was making decent progress, killing time nicely, when another announcement went off- our plane was coming from Indianapolis but had a stop in Minneapolis first, and it hadn’t left Indy yet. We’re now looking at a 4+ hour delay…
So I left. It felt risky, but I needed real food and my house is only a 20 minute drive from the airport. Plus, my couch is WAY comfier than airport chairs 🙂 (bonus- since I had been parked for less than 4 hours, I didn’t have to pay for parking when I left!)
I hung out at home for a few hours, refreshing the flight status page every 15-20 minutes (I was slightly paranoid that I would miss an update, or they’d suddenly source a new plane and move the departure time up), before heading back to the airport at 1930 (I waited until after I saw that the plane left MSP and was actually on its way).
The flight itself was fine- I mean, I was at the back of the plane, in a middle seat between two big dudes and surrounded by small children, but noise canceling headphones and a movie (on my tiny phone screen) provided enough of a distraction.
We landed in Orlando around midnight-30, started taxiing to our gate, then stopped. After a few minutes, the pilot got on the intercom to let us know there was a plane at our assigned gate and we were waiting on a new assignment.
So we waited. And waited. And waited some more until 20-ish minutes later the pilot comes back on and apologized, again, and added that at this point he was just embarrassed- turns out the plane in our spot had been diverted from elsewhere when a storm rolled through, but rather than tell them to unload and move or use our 4.5 hour delay to find us a new home, the control tower simply forgot about us and the plane in our spot was parked for the night.
To my plane’s credit, no one rioted or yelled or even got rowdy- a few people got up to use the bathroom or stretch, but for the most part, most of the passengers just stayed put. I think we were all just too tired to do anything more than wait at this point.
After some more waiting, he came back on the intercom with good news- we have a new gate! but, following the theme of today, it was in a different terminal on the other side of the airport. So we taxied some more and finally arrived at our new gate, about 45 minutes after we landed (and I’m pretty sure we set a new airplane ground speed record!)
Unfortunately, I still had to catch a bus to my hotel. I contemplated just grabbing an Uber so I wouldn’t have to wait for my bus to fill up or stop to drop other people off, but I kind of just autopiloted to the bus and crashed. I woke up when the bus slammed on its brakes for a red light and fortunately, was the 2nd drop-off stop. I finally got to my room at 0245.
Longest. Day. EVER!