Vacation Horror Story

I settle back into the plane seat, breathing a sigh of relief that my journey is finally underway. How could I know that the series of mishaps and obstructions that I have overcome to arrive at this point were barely the beginning of the adventure?

I think back to the true beginning.

“Make sure you get your passport early,” she said.

I was supposed to travel to Europe for a six-week vacation after graduation. My friend was in Paris for her Junior Year Abroad at the Sorbonne. She had good advice for me in several areas, so I listened to what she had to say. I submitted my application for a passport at least five months before my departure date. I scheduled my flights and arranged for my EURAIL Pass. Everything seemed to be under control.

It was only eight weeks before my departure when I got word that there was a problem with my passport. The identification papers I had provided would not be sufficient. I needed an original birth certificate. I did not have one. My parents did not have one. The trouble began.

I contacted the hospital in Tennessee, where I was born. They sent me a formal letter stating they had sent all of their birth records to Nashville a few years earlier. I contacted the Tennessee Department of Vital Records. With seven weeks to go TDVR sent me a letter saying they had no record of my birth.

Now it was time to pull some strings. My grandfather still lived in my town of birth, so he contacted his state representative. That gentleman in turn contacted the state senator, who agreed to send one of his staff members across the street to conduct a hand search through the appropriate records. With six weeks until departure, I got a letter saying the hand search had yielded no results.

We made a call to the senator who agreed to have the Department of Vital Records write an official letter declaring the State had lost my birth certificate. I got letters from the attending physician and obstetrician stating that they remembered my birth. The senator was nice enough to add a letter requesting the passport office to expedite my application since it was now less than five weeks until my departure.

A week until departure I was beginning to worry again. There was still no passport in my mailbox. I called the passport office in Washington, DC. They were very nice and very helpful. They were aware of my situation and they told me that my passport would be ready on time…that is, on the very day of my departure. I simply had to come by the office in Washington and pick it up.

I had scheduled a flight from Atlanta to New York and a flight from New York to Paris by way of Iceland. Now I had to change my first leg to go to Washington, and then schedule a flight from Washington to New York in time for check-in for my transatlantic flight. These days, with tightened security it would have been impossible, but I managed to schedule it, although with very little margin for error.

The big day comes. My MARTA connection goes off without a hitch and I board the plane with time to spare. Big sigh of relief…disaster averted.

So now, I sit on the plane, waiting for take-off, relaxing at last. The flight attendant closes the hatch and we push back from the gate. The pilot comes on saying that there is congestion and we will be delayed, slightly, but we should reach Washington on time.

The schedule has me arriving in Washington just before three. I get the passport from the office on K Street and make a 4:40 flight to Kennedy International in New York.

With the slight delays, we actually hit the gate in Washington at 3:45. It is going to be a real trial to make my 4:40 flight now. I decide to take the Metro rail to avoid traffic. The Delta desk puts through a call for me to the passport office…I am on my way. The lady says she will be waiting at the door with my passport in hand. What great service from a government office!

Metro is crowded but I sit down thinking that I just might make this. Then the train stops before it even clears the platform. We have a ten-minute delay due to construction congestion up ahead. My calm deserts me. There is no way I can make my scheduled flight now. I begin thinking of alternatives. There is a commuter flight from Washington to LaGuardia. If I am lucky, I can still get to Kennedy before my 7 o’clock check-in time.

I sit in the hot train car waiting and stewing. My leg will not stop jumping up and down. My fingers are tapping.

Finally, the train begins to move. It is 4:25. My original flight is boarding. At this point, I am not even sure I will make the commuter flight. The train rolls into the station at 4:53…the passport office closes in seven minutes. I am jogging as I hit the street. Fortunately, I know my way around Washington well enough to run straight to the building. The building guard tells me it is too late – it is after five and the offices are closed, but I run past him and up the stairs to the second floor. The door to the passport office is open and a lady is standing there with my passport in hand. I want to kiss her, but I settle for calling out “Thank you so much!” as I turn and run back down the stairs and outside to yell for a taxicab.

The cab back to National is very fast. It is only about twenty minutes after five when I jog up to the Delta desk and change my flight to the commuter. We taxi out to the runway and the pilot announces that congestion over New York will delay our takeoff for twenty minutes. Thirty minutes later, we begin to creep forward. We finally leave the ground at the time we were supposed to land at La Guardia. The flight is delayed again in the air, but we finally land about fifteen minutes before my check-in time at Kennedy. I run to the desk and ask them to call my airline and tell them I am on my way. I sprint to the taxi stand and jump into a car.

I am careening through rush hour traffic in New York City. The taxi driver has taken me seriously when I say I need to be at Kennedy ten minutes ago. I am sure our tires must have climbed the concrete barrier between lanes at least twice. We pull in and I give him a twenty-dollar tip. He drives away and I realize I am at the wrong terminal.

Ten more minutes are wasted making my way to the terminal where my bags are locked up in a storage closet. They came to New York without me two hours ago.

I am relaxed once I get my bags, though. I am thinking that the call from La Guardia alerted my airline to my imminent arrival. The plane leaves at eight and it is only about ten after seven. I catch a bus around to the terminal that houses my international airline and walk through the doors into cataclysmic chaos.

There must be two hundred people crowded into this office, all screaming at the clerks behind the counter. The air traffic delays made nearly ninety percent of the scheduled passengers late for check in and the airline gave away all of the seats to stand-by customers. To make the situation worse there are no seats for the next flight – which is tomorrow. Everyone must wait two days to depart. Yeah, that sounds crazy to me too, but it was the story.

I decide not to get into the middle of the fight. Once I understand the situation, I just sit down and wait for the crowd to clear. Finally, I am the last customer left in the office. I walk over to the clerk. It is ten minutes before eight, so I make a last minute beg…I will sit in the aisle all the way to Europe, but I have to get there for my birthday. The young lady looks upon me in a kindly way and says, “Sorry, you cannot sit in the aisle. Tonight’s flight is absolutely full.”

Then she smiles and says, “But I have one seat left for tomorrow night. I did not want to mention it when the wolves were howling earlier for fear of violence. Can I put you on that flight?”

Eighteen hours pass. I am alone in New York City. I find a hotel and get some rest then I return to the airport about six hours before my flight, just so I will run no chance of being late again. At eight o’clock on my second day, almost 36 hours since I left home in Atlanta, the plane pushes back from the gate. After minimal delays, we get to the head of the runway and I am finally relaxed. I am heading for Paris!

We accelerate down the runway. The wheels lift off the tarmac and I breathe a sigh of relief. There is a loud Whunck and I stiffen up again. No one else seems to notice anything, so I try to relax. It is only ten minutes later that the whispering starts. Someone has heard that something is wrong with the plane. The flight attendants are pacing up and down the aisles looking very preoccupied. After another ten minutes, the co-pilot comes on and the first thing he says is, “Ladies and Gentlemen, please do not be alarmed…” at which point everyone becomes extremely alarmed. He continues, “We are over Long Island. In a few minutes we will be over open ocean and we will begin dumping fuel so that we can circle back to New York.”

It takes thirty minutes to dump fuel and another twenty to fly back to Kennedy. We make a fly-by. It turns out that the warning light that tells the pilot the wheels are down did not go off. If the wheels are down the drag will cause us to run out of fuel over the ocean. But if the wheels are up, then the light is broken and we will not know if the wheels are secure…so there is a chance we might land with the wheels unsecured – we might belly-flop onto the runway.

The fly-by is apparently not definitive, but they decide to land anyway. We are heavy, because they did not drop as much fuel as we would have used on a complete flight, so we come in low and fast. We seem to skim to tops of the waves and narrowly miss the rocks at the beginning of the runway. We touch down and the wheels hold – The crowd goes wild. There is cheering and clapping, which stops just as suddenly as it started. Outside the window, we see that a parade is converging on us. Fire trucks, foam trucks, ambulances and police cars are flashing, wailing and rushing in towards the plane as we continue to thunder down the runway. Now I can see the far end of the runway coming…and it is getting closer much faster than I like. The engines are roaring, trying to slow us. The front end of the plane touches dirt, but then it stops. We sit perfectly still, listening to the engines winding down.

That is pretty much my story. They fed us dinner on the plane as they refueled and checked the warning lights and wheels. We arrived in Luxembourg four hours late and so missed the connecting flight to Paris. They put us on a bus and we rode across the French countryside for hours. I finally arrived in Paris only a day and a half late for my birthday. My six-week European vacation was underway.