ME!! That’s what! History repeats itself. Here I am stuck overnight, AGAIN, in Manchester, NH sitting in a hotel room eating pizza. After waiting for almost 4 hours at the airport today, my flight back to San Diego was cancelled. The VERY last time I was in NH, I flew through Manchester and my flight was cancelled then as well, although last time it was because of a spring blizzard. I blogged about it then too (click here to read Snowbound) Today the reason was a combination of factors. First, the flight was delayed for a maintenance issue, which ended up being nothing. Then it was delayed due to air traffic congestion in Atlanta, which is where I was connecting through. THEN, the delay lasted so long that the flight crew went past their allowable flight time and couldn’t continue on. The next available flight was at 7 am so rather then have my mother drive the 2 hours roundtrip to the airport and back, I just decided to use the hotel voucher from the airline and stay local. So here I am wasting a perfectly good Friday night sitting in a hotel eating crappy pizza and watching CNN… THANKS Delta Airlines!

You would think in this day and age with all of our advanced technology and modern travel achievements that we would be better at this. Why on earth does it take 12+ hours to get across the country??… and that’s when everything goes exactly to schedule. It’s ridiculous. Oh yeah, sure, everyone will say that air travel is still the most efficient way to get places and that it’s better then taking the train or a covered wagon across mountain passes like they did a hundred years ago. Well you can stick it. I’m not asking for anything that isn’t already possible. We can’t get across the country faster and easier because nobody cares enough to make it happen. The airlines CHOOSE to route us through hub after hub in order to save money and consolidate expenses. I can’t find a non-stop flight these days to save my life. Sure, I fully understand the airlines are all bankrupt and need to fly their equipment at capacity and not waste resources but it just seems like $400 should get you a little more these days. In an era of instant communication and information at the speed of light, it just seems insane that it takes a full day (sometimes 2!) just to go 4-5 hours of actual flying time.

What if you spent $400 to reserve a nice hotel room and you showed up and they said, "sorry, we don’t have any rooms left… we thought we were going to but we don’t. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow at 7 AM to get your room." Why are we forced to tolerate this crappy service and inefficient system? It’s enough to make you wanna just say screw it and not go anywhere anymore.

Oh yeah, stay tuned… I fly to Puerto Vallarta on Monday. :)

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