October 27, 2008

Getting to Atlanta

Ok finally I feel like I am ready to start the China posts. Even though I haven't been through all of my photos yet, I am just going to jump right in.

So, Saturday evening after Ashley and Tony's wedding. I get home and am sitting in my room looking up the flights. Courtney was going to drive to Cincinnati, we were taking the first flight out in the morning to Atlanta and then onto Shanghai. However, the 2nd flight of the day was already cancelled and so ours was now overbooked. So, I instead got into my car at 1:45am and drove to Columbus. We got to the airport at around 5 am to find out that there were 5 flights a day from Houston to Columbus on Continental that now due to the Hurricane, and Houston being shut down, those passengers took up all the seats on our planes. Great. We stayed for 2 flights, got breakfast, went back to Courtney's to nap and develope Plan B.

We looked at all of our options but most of the airports around the Ohio, KY and Indiana area were in the same shape. Best bet was to go back to Columbus that evening for the last flight to Atlanta and spend the night. Of course heading to the airport that evening, we got stuck in a wind storm- the after effects of the Hurricane. Arriving at the airport was a non-rev's nightmare. The whole airport was on a ground delay. All flights cancelling, no rental cars and the rebooking lines out the door-literally.


(Here we are in the airport trying to find a one way rental car)

We had no time to think, only way we were going to make it to get on our flight to China was to drive all night to Atlanta. So- that is what we did. We headed out of Columbus trying to avoid all of the fallen trees!


Stopping a few times for caffeine, gas and once outside of Chattanooga for a traffic jam at 3:30 am. (Seriously almost had a heart attack- I didn't think we were going to make it.) Luckily we parked, got through security with 2 hours to spare and I about kissed the gate agent when we handed us our business class seats- next to each other. After 4 hours of sleep in 48hrs I really needed that seat. :) After an hour delay due to Air Traffic Space over Russia- we took off on our 16 hr flight to Shanghai.

No comments: