(07/24/14) Trapped Stateside

Well, we aren't in Iceland. We are trapped here stateside. All of the thunderstorms and lightening yesterday proved to be problematic for airplanes. Who knew? Our flight was delayed by an hour, then again by another hour. At this point we were not worried. We had four hours to kill up at JFK. But then came the death knell; we were delayed by a third hour. That left us 12 minutes to run from our arrival gate to our second gate. Not going to happen, right? About ten minutes after the third delay, all the cell phones in our waiting area rang simultaneously for the fourth time and this time the automated message told us we were not delayed, we were grounded. The flight was cancelled. We dashed over the bank of phones and tried to get another flight for the next day figuring that we could stay in a hotel near BWI and just hop a shuttle back to the airport the next day. Delta had nothing for Thursday at all and could get us there Friday, but we would not arrive until late at night. Boo, Hiss, Delta. 

So, I called my dad to come and get us. Poor guy had only dropped us off four hours before. We made our way downstairs and collected our returned luggage. George was surfing the internet for flights, something, anything, and he stumbled across a deal on kayak.com (Go, Kayak!) that offered us direct flight Business Class seats on Thursday that would fly us overnight and get us there by Friday morning. This means we would only lose about a day and a half instead of the other alternatives, which stunk. George booked the flight and Dad picked us up and we went home to three very happy kitties. 

Getting up this morning and dealing with all the changes would have been quite a task. We had to reschedule a whale watching tour, change our hotel reservations, change our car rental reservation and rebook our return flight (since Delta cancelled the to and from when our flight got cancelled Wednesday night). We would have been on the phone all day if not for Kaitlyn. She is our AAA representative who helped us book the entire trip. She spent her entire day today untangling the knotted mess that our trip had become. We just hung out and waited for her calls about each piece as it was fixed.

We are now sitting in the First Class Lounge for AirFrance, flying on IcelandAir and looking forward to our extended leg room. Yay, IcelandAir!