Monterey Chronicles - Return Flight

Seriously, never fly Delta.

If there had been free Wi-Fi in the Twin Cities airport, I would have posted this from there last night. There was not, and so I couldn’t. I certainly had the time for it though. You see, our return flight had one layover at the Twin Cities, in Minnesota, that was supposed to be about an hour long. Thanks to a slight delay in our leg out from San Jose, that had been shortened to about 40 minutes by the time we were on the ground.

Once we got to the gate, the trouble began: the listed departure time was a full hour after what we were expecting. A prior flight had been delayed or something, thus meaning they wouldn’t have the plane for us to board until an hour later than they had been planning. And that was bad enough, but at least it gave us the time to get dinner or something and relax a little.

Then our gate changed, because the prior flight in our gate had some kind of mechanical problem that necessitated a 2-hour repair. (Take note: Delta is screwing up more than one flight today!) They had already been waiting for something like two hours already when they got this news, so… yeah. Well, we picked up and bounced on over to the new gate.

Where we discovered that the flight we were waiting on wasn’t going to be getting anywhere until 15 minutes before the new (delayed) departure time. Let’s see, cleaning, crew change, and boarding in 15 minutes…? Yeah, no. So now we were going to be delayed an hour and a half, factoring in a reasonable turnaround time.

And then? Then the announcement came on… somehow we no longer had a crew. They had been delayed out of La Guardia in New York, apparently. So they weren’t going to be here until over two hours after the scheduled departure time, and we couldn’t do anything to board or prepare the plane until we had a crew. End result: a delay of two and a half hours, a flight that was supposed to take off at 1919 finally getting out of the gate at 2249.

Anyone else want to know why I hate flying?

(Note: there are more Monterey Chronicles coming; I still have stories to tell about the vacation. I just had to rant about this.)