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Well...
We got up and prepared bright and early on Monday morning. After some difficulty getting through to a taxi company we reserved a taxi for 5pm, got the rest of our things together and generally had time to relax with our extra day and make sure that we had everything. Our flight was going to leave at 19:50 - one of the best times that you can fly if you're going westward, I think, as you don't waste a day travelling but instead hover around the middle of the night and can sleep once you get there.
By 5:10pm the taxi hadn't arrived, and Town Taxi are usually very good at being on time, so I phoned them again and asked them where it was, to be told that there was a driver on the way and he should be there at any minute.
At half past five, still being stranded in the flat watching Gordon Ramsay, I phoned them again, and after a couple of tries to get through the man at the desk said that (regressing somewhat from the situation he'd told me earlier) they were working on getting a taxi to Brookline. I could understand that the ton of snow that fell on the area during the weekend might have caused them some problems, but you get the feeling that they had time to plan ahead, especially seeing as we reserved the taxi so early.
Approaching 6pm and panic, I decided to get out of the flat, wait with our suitcases at the door, and phone the company again to say that if they couldn't honestly get the taxi we'd reserved to us within the next five minutes then we would have to abandon the flat, drag our suitcases up to the main road and try to hail a taxi there, then send them a month-old fish for Christmas. But I couldn't get through to them at all, and after another few minutes of waiting, we desperately began the trek up the snowy lanes...
And we hauled our luggage up to the main road, saw a taxi right away, shouted for it, watched him slow down and then happily ignore us and go on his way. I thought that at least if we'd seen one right away there was a chance that one might come along soon, but on trying the taxi company again they suddenly said that our taxi was right outside our front door. I told them to get him to wait there for five minutes for us to run back, and he said he would see what he could do, as if it was some sort of inconvenience to get him to wait a few minutes on top of the hour that we'd already been waiting for the lift we'd been relying on.
I ran ahead, tearing down the slope with the heaviest of the suitcases and just keeping going by my sheer momentum, with squirrels and old ladies leaping out of my unstoppable path all the way to the bottom of the hill. After that my lungs gave out and I had to limp up the hill on the other side painfully, searching for the lights of a taxi or something that indicated that there was someone there to pick us up.
Eventually, thankfully, lights came into view, the taxi looking like it had been circling the area a few times and just wondering whether he should ring any doorbells or not. I jumped in, we picked up Whitney on the way, and we crawled through the traffic to the airport, with a decent amount of time left to get on our plane for 7:50.
And after waiting in a one-and-a-half hour long queue (which we skipped half of thanks to Whitney's brother reserving a space for us) they told us that it was delayed for nearly three hours.
Despite my undisguised distress at how badly the evening was going so far, we tried to make the best of the situation and went to Legal Sea Food in the airport for dinner, rather than just getting a sandwich like we would have had to if the flight had left on time. (It's called that because of the owner being the son of someone who ran a Legal Market, and not because of any direct competition with a Dodgy Sea Food next door). After that, we went through security, which had only one scanner open, and I was sent on ahead to find some seats at our gate. I found a colony of miserable-looking people at the end of the waiting area, so backtracked to a completely empty gate a few spaces along instead, where I could just about see what was going on. Twice throughout the wait, parties of people arrived and sat down, only to be told that there was another gate change for them and move away again.
Being out of my mind with nervousness at this point, I went back and forward between our gate and our seating area looking at the departure boards. There were six flights on the list, which had been meant to leave at anything from about 5pm, which were still stuck on the ground. On one of these visits to the boards, I was proudly present to see our time flick from 10:20 to 12am, which I then went back to report to the others, along with my new intention to walk home and spend Christmas with our small plastic tree instead.
But a visit to the man on our gate's desk later, we found that it had been a mistake of some sort and they really weren't confident of the time that they would leave at all, because they had had a plane prepared for ages but the crew to fly it had not yet turned up from Florida - a check of the boards showed that curiously a flight on the same route that was meant to leave there at 8pm had already arrived, but the one that we were waiting for (the 5pm one) hadn't yet come in. So it was a couple of time changes later, at half past eleven, that we eventually saw a few people in blue suits make their way through our gate and everyone sort of edged forwards a bit, ready to dive through it.
The woman who had taken charge of the gate made the announcement that we were now dealing with flight crew legality issues (they're only allowed to log a certain number of hours of flight a day), which prompted a woman at the back to call back that it was easy to blame it on us, starting a friendly pantomime-like argument that was a surreal scene that I hadn't yet seen in any airport (i.e. people smiling). But she said that we seriously had to get on there and get seated as soon as possible.
All this made it very disturbing when four people turned up in the row of three seats behind us. After some confusion and asking their names and flight numbers, just to make sure, we saw one of the air hostesses throwing a couple out at the front of the plane. Whitney's best guess was that they had been on standby for a flight that was six hours late and now had to get off because of a mistaken double booking - I think that no matter how ghastly my evening was, theirs would have been worse.
And we... flew, eventually, with me in a sort of half-conscious daze throughout most of the flight that was once a convenient not-quite-evening one but had turned into an all-nighter. We could tell they were trying to get us to the runway quickly, we took off just after midnight, and six hours later we landed steeply and stumbled off to get our luggage. We were picked up by Whitney's dad and finally got into bed at five in the morning.
Inexplicably I woke up at 9am, which I've only just realized gave me only four hours of sleep - today I've only been capable of wandering around blearily like a geriatric who's escaped from a care home. The others have gone out to get some Christmas ornaments, leaving me behind as I carelessly sat down on an overly comfortable chair and instantly fell fast asleep.
Sorry that this just wasn't funny at all. Next year I'm going to drop a few strong hints about just spending the holidays with ourselves.
We got up and prepared bright and early on Monday morning. After some difficulty getting through to a taxi company we reserved a taxi for 5pm, got the rest of our things together and generally had time to relax with our extra day and make sure that we had everything. Our flight was going to leave at 19:50 - one of the best times that you can fly if you're going westward, I think, as you don't waste a day travelling but instead hover around the middle of the night and can sleep once you get there.
By 5:10pm the taxi hadn't arrived, and Town Taxi are usually very good at being on time, so I phoned them again and asked them where it was, to be told that there was a driver on the way and he should be there at any minute.
At half past five, still being stranded in the flat watching Gordon Ramsay, I phoned them again, and after a couple of tries to get through the man at the desk said that (regressing somewhat from the situation he'd told me earlier) they were working on getting a taxi to Brookline. I could understand that the ton of snow that fell on the area during the weekend might have caused them some problems, but you get the feeling that they had time to plan ahead, especially seeing as we reserved the taxi so early.
Approaching 6pm and panic, I decided to get out of the flat, wait with our suitcases at the door, and phone the company again to say that if they couldn't honestly get the taxi we'd reserved to us within the next five minutes then we would have to abandon the flat, drag our suitcases up to the main road and try to hail a taxi there, then send them a month-old fish for Christmas. But I couldn't get through to them at all, and after another few minutes of waiting, we desperately began the trek up the snowy lanes...
And we hauled our luggage up to the main road, saw a taxi right away, shouted for it, watched him slow down and then happily ignore us and go on his way. I thought that at least if we'd seen one right away there was a chance that one might come along soon, but on trying the taxi company again they suddenly said that our taxi was right outside our front door. I told them to get him to wait there for five minutes for us to run back, and he said he would see what he could do, as if it was some sort of inconvenience to get him to wait a few minutes on top of the hour that we'd already been waiting for the lift we'd been relying on.
I ran ahead, tearing down the slope with the heaviest of the suitcases and just keeping going by my sheer momentum, with squirrels and old ladies leaping out of my unstoppable path all the way to the bottom of the hill. After that my lungs gave out and I had to limp up the hill on the other side painfully, searching for the lights of a taxi or something that indicated that there was someone there to pick us up.
Eventually, thankfully, lights came into view, the taxi looking like it had been circling the area a few times and just wondering whether he should ring any doorbells or not. I jumped in, we picked up Whitney on the way, and we crawled through the traffic to the airport, with a decent amount of time left to get on our plane for 7:50.
And after waiting in a one-and-a-half hour long queue (which we skipped half of thanks to Whitney's brother reserving a space for us) they told us that it was delayed for nearly three hours.
Despite my undisguised distress at how badly the evening was going so far, we tried to make the best of the situation and went to Legal Sea Food in the airport for dinner, rather than just getting a sandwich like we would have had to if the flight had left on time. (It's called that because of the owner being the son of someone who ran a Legal Market, and not because of any direct competition with a Dodgy Sea Food next door). After that, we went through security, which had only one scanner open, and I was sent on ahead to find some seats at our gate. I found a colony of miserable-looking people at the end of the waiting area, so backtracked to a completely empty gate a few spaces along instead, where I could just about see what was going on. Twice throughout the wait, parties of people arrived and sat down, only to be told that there was another gate change for them and move away again.
Being out of my mind with nervousness at this point, I went back and forward between our gate and our seating area looking at the departure boards. There were six flights on the list, which had been meant to leave at anything from about 5pm, which were still stuck on the ground. On one of these visits to the boards, I was proudly present to see our time flick from 10:20 to 12am, which I then went back to report to the others, along with my new intention to walk home and spend Christmas with our small plastic tree instead.
But a visit to the man on our gate's desk later, we found that it had been a mistake of some sort and they really weren't confident of the time that they would leave at all, because they had had a plane prepared for ages but the crew to fly it had not yet turned up from Florida - a check of the boards showed that curiously a flight on the same route that was meant to leave there at 8pm had already arrived, but the one that we were waiting for (the 5pm one) hadn't yet come in. So it was a couple of time changes later, at half past eleven, that we eventually saw a few people in blue suits make their way through our gate and everyone sort of edged forwards a bit, ready to dive through it.
The woman who had taken charge of the gate made the announcement that we were now dealing with flight crew legality issues (they're only allowed to log a certain number of hours of flight a day), which prompted a woman at the back to call back that it was easy to blame it on us, starting a friendly pantomime-like argument that was a surreal scene that I hadn't yet seen in any airport (i.e. people smiling). But she said that we seriously had to get on there and get seated as soon as possible.
All this made it very disturbing when four people turned up in the row of three seats behind us. After some confusion and asking their names and flight numbers, just to make sure, we saw one of the air hostesses throwing a couple out at the front of the plane. Whitney's best guess was that they had been on standby for a flight that was six hours late and now had to get off because of a mistaken double booking - I think that no matter how ghastly my evening was, theirs would have been worse.
And we... flew, eventually, with me in a sort of half-conscious daze throughout most of the flight that was once a convenient not-quite-evening one but had turned into an all-nighter. We could tell they were trying to get us to the runway quickly, we took off just after midnight, and six hours later we landed steeply and stumbled off to get our luggage. We were picked up by Whitney's dad and finally got into bed at five in the morning.
Inexplicably I woke up at 9am, which I've only just realized gave me only four hours of sleep - today I've only been capable of wandering around blearily like a geriatric who's escaped from a care home. The others have gone out to get some Christmas ornaments, leaving me behind as I carelessly sat down on an overly comfortable chair and instantly fell fast asleep.
Sorry that this just wasn't funny at all. Next year I'm going to drop a few strong hints about just spending the holidays with ourselves.
