You'd think. And you'd be wrong.
I woke up bright and early on Wednesday, December 20th to catch a flight from Calgary to Denver. Three and a half hours crammed in a tin can punctuated by approximately one hour in an even smaller tin can at the end of which, it was promised, I'd be safely in Durango, Colorado.
That was the plan, anyway.
I arrived at the ticket counter a good two hours ahead of time, got my boarding pass and made it through customs in record time. The guy behind the customs desk barely even glanced at my passport. Kinda surprising since the last time I tried to cross the border I was informed that I was on the terrorist watch list. This time they barely even looked at me. I'm at a complete loss to explain that one.
The flight left at 6:55 am on Wednesday morning. The skies were clear and dark (the sun hadn't risen yet), but the weather in Calgary was pretty much ideal. The temperature hovered around freezing, the terrorism alert was yellow, and all in all, life could've been a lot worse.
The plane took off less than five minutes late (so, pretty much right on time) and turned south, cruising towards the distant, invisible runway at Denver International Airport.
I didn't even have any idea that anything was wrong in Denver until we were about an hour out from Denver, and even then the only notice was "some flights out of Denver have been cancelled." I wasn't really worried, since there are a dozen flights to Durango from Denver, and even if mine was cancelled, I figured my chances of getting onto one of them were pretty good.
And, to be fair, they probably would have been pretty good, if any flights were leaving Denver at all.
Now, I should mention that the descent into Denver was one of the most uneventful landings I've ever experienced (and I've experienced a few); except for the fact that we couldn't see the ground until we were about a hundred feet above it. Due to some minor delays enroute, we arrived at the gate approximately fifteen minutes before my flight to Durango was scheduled to leave. I thought I'd dodged a bullet. I figured if we could land in this weather, we could take off, as long as we took off before the weather got any worse.
I know, it's a vain, delusional hope, but it was something for me to cling to... for about thirty seconds, right until I saw the monitors and found that pretty much every posted flight out of Denver (including two to Durango) had been cancelled.
And that was pretty much the high point of my day.
I actually made it to a window that gave me a real picture of the weather outside. The weather was horrendous. The snow was falling so thick that from the large window, I couldn't see the airplane parked right outside it. And it was falling sideways. Brutal winds blasted the dry snow into thick snowdrifts which piled around buildings in piles several feet thick. I later found out that they were describing this as the fourth most severe blizzard to hit Denver ever. How, exactly, they quantify these things is a bit of a mystery to me, but I'm not about to argue the point. I've lived in Calgary for twenty-seven years (not counting five that I spent in Quebec), and I've seen a bizzard this bad exactly once in my life. And I was seven at the time.
I landed at 9:45. By ten, every outgoing flight had been cancelled; by noon, every incoming one. Some flights still arrived into the afternoon because United Airlines is being run by a bunch of monkeys, but as of noon, Denver International Airport was closed for business.
Which meant that I had to find a place to stay for the night.
Someone was walking around handing out these little pink slips which provided a good rate for a hotel that night... provided that we could get out of the airport. Something, it turns out, that was easier said than done. Getting a hotel room was actually the easy part. Getting to the hotel, on the other hand, was going to take a little work.
So I called my folks. On my cellphone. Long distance. Roaming. I couldn't get through to United Airlines to get a flight to Durango; or anywhere, for that matter, so I had people in two different cities try to get me a flight to anywhere. As long as it was out of Denver. From there, I figured I could make my way to somewhere that was in striking distance of Durango.
It was coming up on two o'clock in the afternoon at this point. I'd been standing in line for a little over three hours, only to be told that they weren't reserving any more flights, and that they weren't letting me get my checked bag out of the system. So it looked like I wasn't going to be able to change my clothes until this was all over. United Airlines' stock was in freefall as far as I was concerned.
I ran into a airport employee and showed him my ticket. He looked at my ticket with a confused expression on his face.
"Why did your flight leave Calgary?" He asked me.
I looked at him with a somewhat flabbergasted look on my face which is universally recognized to mean "why the hell are you asking me!?" But aloud I only said "what do you mean?"
"Well, we sent out word at 4:00 am that no more flights were to leave for Denver. That's three hours before your flight left," he told me, as if I wasn't able to do the math myself.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, I wasn't already pissed off at United Airlines, that pretty much drove the last nail into the coffin. If they'd mentioned just once before I got on the plane that getting out of Denver might be a little difficult, I could've waited and got onto another flight to somewhere else.
Anywhere else.
But I digress.
So... getting out of the Airport. Believe it or not, that would be the largest challenge I would face over the next 48 hours. I knew I had a room reserved, and would at least have a warm bed, assuming that I could get out of the airport.
Shuttle busses were coming, infrequently, to the airport and let me just say that I saw something of a wide spectrum of human behaviour during my time waiting for the bus. I saw people elbow others out of the way just to get onto the bus, and I saw a crowd stand aside to let by a woman with a baby. As you'll see in a moment, I'm not exactly in a position where I can huck stones around, but I felt it important to point out that human beings are fickle creatures.
Around 4:00 pm, I looked at the (huge) crowd around me and came to the realization that the vast majority of them weren't going to get out of the airport before the highways closed. I turned to two guys I'd spent the afternoon with and told them that if we wanted out of this, we were going to have to short-out the lineup. Taxis were already starting to bypass the airport and try to get back into town before the highway closed. So we decided that we had to do something stupid. We hiked up the shoulder of the highway, in zero visibility, in snow that was driving into us and freezing our eyes shut. We flagged down a taxi, and between the three of us, we offered a $120 "tip" on top of the fare to get to the hotel.
Yep, we bribed a taxi driver to get out of the airport. I'm not proud of it, but it did the job. I should point out at this point that normally, the ride from the airport to the hotel is approximately 20 minutes. The three of us piled into the taxi at approximately 4:13 pm. It was just after six when we arrived at the hotel. I'm no stranger to blizzards, but this one scared the bajesus out of me. Visibility was functionally zero. Cars had been abandoned on both sides of the highway, and you could see people trying to hike along the median to safety. We stopped to help jump-start two cars, helped push another one out of a snowdrift, and we carried another person to the hotel we were going to, mostly at my insistance; my attempts to atone for leaving a bunch of people stranded at the airport, I guess. At any rate, the (now four) of us made it to the hotel and we gave the taxi driver his payoff (with an additional $40 contributed by the person we'd picked up). I think we probably set the record as the single highest fare he got year. It's also worth mentioning that as we were driving away from the airport, we heard over the radio that the highways into and out of the airport were closed; so I'm pretty sure that we were some of the last people actually get away from DIA.
Like I said, I'm not proud of it, but it worked. It sure as hell beat being stranded at the airport.
I checked in at 6:12 pm (I feel I should direct your attention to the time at which my flight landed at DIA, a few paragraphs north of this one).
I slid into my room and crashed pretty much immediately. I needed some sleep.
I'll jump forward a couple of days here, since not much that was particularly noteworthy occurred for two days other than being told "no, Denver International Airport is not opened yet," repeatedly. I did manage to get a reserved flight on the 23rd from Denver to Salt Lake City, standby; then from Salt Lake City to Durango, also standby. To use a sports metaphor, it was like fumbling at the four yard line, being pushed back to the thirty, than attempting a touchdown when all of my receivers have broken ankles. For two days, we couldn't really leave the hotel until the snow plows cleared the roads, and even if we could, there wasn't really anywhere to go. I hung out with a fellow pinko liberal at the hotel bar discussing at length how much we both hated Bush and his administration. He was a nice guy. He bought me a couple of drinks. Turns out that he was also a fan of the Crown Royal and Coke; my drink of choice, when I'm not buying.
So, we had nothing better to do for two days than sit at the hotel bar and have a few (dozen) drinks.
I tried in the interim to show up uber-early to the airport and get on an earlier flight to Durango on standby, but it didn't work out. They were telling me at the time that the earliest they could get me out of the city was the 29th. Fortunately, I had my Denver-Salt Lake City-Durango ace in the hole.
So, the 23rd rolled around. I want to take a moment to point out that that day, exactly one year prior, I was also stranded in Denver International Airport, and I ended up driving from Denver to Durango (for seven hours) with three strangers I ran into at the airport; arriving at 3:00 am on Christmas Eve.
But I digress again.
DIA was a madhouse. It was a state of organized chaos. At 8:00 am (ten hours before my flight was scheduled to leave), the lineup to get to the ticket counter was 2.7 miles long, winding its way all over the airport. I know this because the woman standing two spaces behind me was wearing a pedometer.You can see a picture of the lineup to the ticket counter here.
In an act which could be considered cruel, in one of its meanderings, the lineup for the ticket counter overlooked the security lineup, which was just as bad; and that's where we were going next.
The guy who helped me at the ticket counter (two and a half hours after I got in line) was pissed off, not that I can really blame him. He'd spent the last couple of days talking with really pissed off people, I guess it rubbed off on him.
So after just shy of three hours standing in line to get a boarding pass, I stood for just shy of two more waiting to go through security. That line was longer, but it moved faster. I attached a picture of the lineup for security as well.
I made it to the gate my plane would be leaving from, and waited. I had another four hours before my flight left. I had an hour and a half connection in Salt Lake city, so as long as my flight left roughly on time, I would make it to Durango after a long day of traveling, but I'd make it.
Notice the qualifier.
I watched as the flight from Denver to Salt Lake City announced that the flight, instead of leaving at 6:00 pm, would be leaving at 8:30 pm. Unless the flight from Denver to Salt Lake was less than a half hour long (which it isn't), there was no possible way I was going to make my connection; and frankly, I was going to trade one stranding for another, since I wouldn't have any way out of Salt Lake City when I got there.
My day had just got a lot worse.
So I called my folks to let them know that they probably shouldn't bother making a bed for me, it was starting to look unlikely that I was going to leave Denver. United Airline's stock was again in freefall as far as I was concerned.
To put things in perspective, I'd now been in Denver, Colorado, less than 300 miles from my final destination, for 78 hours, I was tired, I'd been wearing the same clothes for four days, and I smelled like something that had died in an outhouse. I was not having a good day.
Then I had a thought.
The previous year, April had spent New Year's with me in Durango, and to get there, she had flown from Denver to Cortez; a tiny town about an hour away from Durango.
The flight was a tiny little propeller-powered Beechcraft; which departed from a small, corner of Denver International Airport; and it was a flight that absolutely nobody knew about.
So I'm pretty sure I set land-speed records sprinting from Concourse B to the extreme far end of concourse A (which, for those who are unfamiliar with DIA, is the single most distant point possible from the gate I was sitting at), and skidded to a stop right in front of the gate for a flight to Cortez. The nice grandmotherly woman behind the counter said that I was the first on the standby list, and that there was room on the flight, so it looked good. Then she said the single most dreaded word in the english language (for me, anyway, at that time): "but."
"But," she told me, "you're going to have to get a paper ticket which shows what we call an 'involuntary transfer' from Salt Lake City to Cortez."
"Perfect," I told her, "how do I do that?"
"Go to the Customer Services Desk, it'll take them ten minutes," she informed me.
She'd barely finished the sentence, before I dashed (again at a full sprint) back to concourse B (the customer services desk happened to be right next to the gate I was waiting at, which, you'll recall, is about as far away from the gate for the flight to Cortez as you can get without standing on the tarmac). So I skid to a stop just in front of the customer services desk, only to find out that United Airlines had just seen it fit to cancel four flights. The lineup was weaving back several hundred meters. There were exactly forty-one minutes until the flight to Cortez left, and there was no possible way that I was going to make it to the counter in time.
So I ran, again at a full sprint, to the far end of Concourse A (that's three sprints back and forth, for those of you keeping count) and arrived at the gate, out of breath, sweaty, and smelly, all of which combined to make me look just pathetic enough for her maternal instinct to kick in.
"Tell you what," she said, "you're first on the standby list, so I will sell you a ticket at the last minute to fly to Cortez."
So that's how it played out. Literally seconds before the flight was to leave, I forked over $270 (US), to hop a flight at the last minute to fly from Denver to Cortez.
I heaved a huge sigh of relief as I sat in my seat on the tiny plane.
The engines spun up, and the plane turned to taxi towards the runway.
Then it stopped.
It stopped dead in the middle of the flight apron, its engines spinning, waiting to lift off.
The pilot turned around and announced: "Folks, I'm sorry to announce that we've had a minor technical problem and we cannot lift off at this time. We're going to go back to the gate and deplane, and we'll see if we can get this corrected."
There's a point at which the situation becomes just absurd enough to be funny. I was quietly giggling to myself as I sat in the airport for the next half hour, watching them try to fix the plane outside. Maybe it was because I was exhausted, both physically and emotionally, but the whole situation suddenly seemed hilarious. I remember I had to force myself not to giggle uncontrolably when April called me on my cellphone while I was waiting at the gate.
The flight finally lifted off, almost an hour late, but it lifted off, and landed in the tiny airport in Cortez, Colorado, just over an hour later.
Me, I was just happy to be out of Denver.
Dad was already waiting for me at the gate when I got off of the plane. I vowed never to fly through Denver; ever again.
Now, as an addendum, remember how they wouldn't let me get my bags and as a result, I had to wear the same clothes for four days? Well, guess what, my bag arrived in Durango the day before I did. So apparently, it was more important for them to get my bags to Durango than it was to get me there.
Nice to know where I rate.
So, for those of you keeping track, I'm never flying through Denver again, and I'm never flying United.
Happy New Year, everybody.
1 comment:
Wow! My girlfriend got stuck in Denver once. She hated it and her airline wasn't any help either.
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