Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

I am writing from the Marriott in Houston. Yesterday turned into the weirdest travel day I've ever had.

I got up at 3:30 am so the GMP could drive me down to Portland to catch the Trailways bus to Boston. The roads were clear and we got to Portland without any delays.

I got onto the bus and napped most of the way down. We pulled into Boston at 7:00 am after a quick stop at Logan. Everything was going smooth until I found out at 7:45 that Greyhound / Trailways had suspended service to all points south and west from Boston due to bad weather. I called the GMP to let her know what was up and she suggested I try the Amtrak. (Which was a fantastic idea, and one that I completely missed. I was thinking of trying to find a flight from Boston to NYC or maybe another bus line. Both of my ideas really weren't that good.)

I managed to get on the 8:20 train headed to Washington, D.C and it got me to Newark Liberty at 1:30 pm. I'm glad I went up to Maine to visit Cheryl's parents because apparently the same snow storm that hit Massachusetts and Conneticut also messed up the roads in NY and PA. I might not have been able to get a bus or train from Scranton as we had planned. As it was, the even though the train stayed close to the coast, there was a lot of snow flying around.

At Newark-Liberty I got through security just fine, though it was really busy, and the settled in to wait for my 4:30 flight. 4:30 came and went and then Continental told us that our flight crew had been delayed on their flight into Newark by bad weather. 90 minutes later they landed and then started getting our plane ready to go. We finally boarded at 6:30 and pulled away from the gate at 7:00 pm.

And then we sat on the taxi-way. Apparently the ground-crew noticed an access panel on one of the engines was open. There was another delay to close off the panel. And then another delay after the Captain informed us that the panel was in fact damaged. We sat there for about an hour until word came back that we were being reassigned a new gate and Continental was going to figure out if they could fix the problem or even assign a new 767 for us. We sat for almost two hours during which Continental decided to fix the access panel, had the fix inspected, filed a new flight plan, and reboarded everybody.

We finally took off at 10:00 pm Eastern. We arrived here in Houston at midnight Central time. They put us up for the night here at the Marriott, but it turns out the next flight from Houston to Vancouver isn't until 9:00 pm tonight.

The good news is that I least get a chance to recover from a really long travel day, and also now have a place to get an internet connection so I can catch up on all the e-mail I missed at home and at work. If all goes well, I'll be home in Vancouver around 2 am tomorrow morning.