Eigenmumbles

I was in Denver for a meeting on Wednesday, and flew back to the east coast on the Wednesday night red-eye. I knew on departure that the weather was not good for flying: we went from Denver to Newark via southern Texas because of a solid line of storms up the middle of the country, and we hit some weather-related turbulence on our descent into Newark. But we made it into Newark in plenty of time for me to reach my connecting flight to Ithaca, leaving at 8:15 am on Thursday morning, and I had high hopes that it might be able to leave in time to beat the weather. This was, perhaps, wishful thinking.

The 8:15 flight was cancelled due to mechanical problems, and I was re-booked to the 2:40 flight. Taking the Shortline bus from NYC to Ithaca takes about five hours, so I probably should have realized then that I might be better off just cutting my losses. But I was not at my sharpest after the red-eye, and so I decided to wait for the afternoon flight. After that was cancelled, and after I heard the gentleman in front of me in the customer service line complaining that he could not wait for three days for the next open seats, I decided to bail. I went into the city by train and subway, hopped onto a bus at Port Authority, and was in Ithaca by 9:40. On the bus ride up, I saw what the weather was like, and understood that it was probably just as well that the 2:40 flight was cancelled.

United has not registered that I bailed on them, and so I have been receiving a sequence of emails over the past day or so about the delays to my re-booked flight. At the latest estimate, I would be leaving Newark today (Saturday) at 5:42 pm, 2.5 days after arriving there. And I have no confidence that the flight will actually leave at the current time estimate. Fortunately, I’m home, so this doesn’t much matter to me.

Tomorrow is my extended family reunion. I missed the reunion last year because I was stuck in Chicago for a while under very similar circumstances: same red-eye flight, same weather, same list of cancellations and delays, same airline. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.