My First Ever Airport Post

I’m sitting here at Tallahassee Regional Airport. My flight was supposed to leave here 40 minutes ago. Now I’m told I won’t be leaving for at least another 90 minutes. I hope that’s the extent of the delay. I’ve been quite fortunate with air travel in the past. I’ve never run into serious delays or problems. The one problem I face now is that my current flight doesn’t leave Tallahassee until 11 minutes before my connecting flight departs Atlanta. Don’t think I’ll make that one. Supposedly I can make the 8:45pm flight from Atlanta to Salt Lake City, but that’s only if my flight isn’t delayed again. And who can say if that’s going to happen? Nobody, least of all the airline.

There are a few things that I’m grateful for at this moment. One, modern technology. Being stranded at an airport isn’t so horrible when you’ve got a laptop and a free wireless connection. I’ve been known to waste an hour or two online at home. Surely, I can do it here. Two, I’m grateful that I’m traveling alone today. As much as I love and miss my family, it would be horrible to be with them right now. Or at least, it would be extremely trying if I had three little kids with me, even if my wonderful wife were here too. Kids can’t handle just sitting around in airport for hours on end. So I’m glad they’re not. I pray we won’t be delayed when we fly out of Utah next week.

Oh crap, I’m tracking things online and I think there may be another delay. They haven’t announced it yet, but it’s not making sense that we can leave at the optimistic current projected time of 7:04pm, given that the airplane we are supposed to be on isn’t leaving Atlanta to come here until 7:14pm. What I hate about this situation is that you get a lot of runaround. They try to keep you calm by bumping the time up just a little bit at a time, but probably somebody somewhere has a sneaking suspicion that it’s really going to be delayed several more hours. They just don’t tell us that. Here’s the thing—I don’t want to fly to Atlanta tonight, just to spend the night in the Atlanta airport and not be able to continue on to SLC until tomorrow morning or something. I don’t even want them to put me up in a hotel in Atlanta. If that’s what’s going to happen, just let me go back to my apartment and start over from Tallahassee tomorrow. If they give me the constant runaround, in my situation at least, it might just drag things out for me unnecessarily.

Well, how about that. They just announced that they’re doing a “plane swap” in Atlanta, and that a plane should be on its way here from Atlanta shortly – and that we should therefore be able to leave here around 7pm, as previously announced. That sounds promising. I’m hopeful. But being hopeful has proven a really stupid thing to be, I’ve learned. At least for things like this. We’ll see. We’ll see.