Air Traffic Control, and a blessing in disguise....

We left to fly to Hawaii today. We have been looking forward to this trip since November. We get to the airport, and everything seems to be running smoothly.

Ha.

Then we hear an announcement that our flight is delayed because of Air Traffic Control. Didn't think much of it, until we still hadn't boarded our plane an hour after we were supposed to have departed.

This was starting to make us worry, because we had a connecting flight in San Fransisco that was only just over an hour after this plane was supposed to land. The desk lady had told us that our other plane hadn't even taken off from where it was coming from yet, because of the same Air Traffic Control. Found out it was bad weather in San Fran, and that's what was holding everything up.

Finally, we boarded our plane about an hour or so late. We were then told that we were going to sit parked on the air strip for about an hour because the dock where our plane was, was needed for another plane that was landing, and the Air Traffic Control crap was still going on in San Fran.

So we sat.

For an hour and TWENTY minutes.

I wonder how many frequent flyer miles this bug has?

At this point, we are still praying that our connecting flight is having these same issues, and that we won't miss it. When we finally took off, and landed in San Fran, we found out that wasn't the case. We had missed our connection by about 15 minutes. Little to say we were both pretty irate.

We then spent about 2 hours in line just to talk to the customer service desk to see if we could hop on another flight. The soonest flight they could squeeze us on to is on Sunday. Sunday? SUNDAY?!? That's TWO days away! There was a plane that was probably not too far over the Pacific Ocean right about then that had two seats with our names on them. And we couldn't get another flight until SUNDAY? Kollin and I, not happy. They told us that we could come back in the morning and try standby, and see if we could catch a flight then, but there's never a guarantee with that.

Kollin called his mom and let her know what was going on, since she was supposed to pick us up from the airport in Hawaii. About 10 minutes or so later, Kollin's phone rang. It was his Aunt Linda that lives in Oakland!

She said that we could stay with her and her partner John until our flight on Sunday, or if we still wanted to try the standby, they'd bring us back to the airport for that. We figured we'd stay with them until Sunday, since Kollin hardly ever gets to see her, and hang out. Plus, our tickets for the Sunday flight are first class, why would we pass that up?

So, we hopped on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) and went to downtown Oakland where Linda came and found us.

We went to this pool hall and played pool with her and John for a few hours, and now here we are.... Making ourselves at home in their spare bedroom. After all that stress today of not knowing what we were going to do, and being so upset that 2 days of our vacation was ruined, our angels in disguise came and saved us. And their names are Linda and John. And also Kollin's mom Kathy for calling Linda. :)