Home Again

We arrived back in Fort Myers late last night after a good trip and good conference in Chicago. It got off to a rough start, because of my mistake.

Originally, our group was to include Ray, the guy who heads up our set construction for Scrooge. I had Ray scheduled for set building workshops at the Arts Conference. However, things changed for him, and he had to back out at the last minute.

So, we added Mark, our music pastor, to take his place. But AirTran wouldn't let us simply change the name on the ticket - we had to cancel Ray's ticket and purchase a ticket for Mark.

I had been through the process of purchasing a ticket for Mark twice before actually attempting to purchase - first, to check the price, and second, to re-check the price. On my third time through I was going to purchase, but something happened in the system and it gave me an error message. So, now it's my fourth time through, I've picked the correct flights three times in a row, so I don't look too closely at what I'm selecting. My time is running out and I need to get home to pack. Bang - I get the tickets, send Mark a copy of the confirmation and run to get my stuff so we can get to the airport.

When we get to the airport, Mark has to check one bag, and we all go to the gate to wait for our flight out of Fort Myers. That's when Mark discovers that although we are all on the same flight to Atlanta, his flight to Chicago is TWO HOURS after ours. We are scheduled to arrive at 9:30pm - he's not scheduled to arrive until midnight.

We didn't have time to address it, because boarding began, so we figured we'd fix it in Atlanta. In Atlanta it just got worse.

That's where we found out that once you check a bag, you can't change flights. I should have remembered that from an episode of The Amazing Race.

Then delays started happening. Our flight got pushed back - but so did Mark's.

In the end, we landed in Chicago about midnight. Rich and I took everyone to the hotel - about 50 minutes from the airport - then returned to the airport to pick up Mark, when his plane landed about 2am. We got in bed about 3am - 4am our time.

Thankfully, things improved from there.

I told my nephew, Luke, this story. This was his reaction.