Travel Adventures of the Waiting Kind

[gerisullivan]

New airport (for me). Off-site parking service was excellent. I've been happy with AviStar at other airports, but PreFlight at PVD is several steps better. Excellent instructions, the shuttle picks you up at your car, an easy-to-maneuver parking lot. Nice.

Counter area, bag screening, and (later) passenger security at the Providence airport is badly designed. Remarkably so. I've been in a fair number of airports over the past 4 years. This is the worst.

Flight to Chicago canceled, Flights tomorrow offered. Oh, joy. I'm trying for standby today -- if I make the first standby flight, I'll connect up with my original flight out of Chicago to Calgary. This would be good. I have a fairly good handle on other options, too. None are especially appealing.

Found seat next to electrical outlet in gate area. Good conversations with fellow inconvenienced travelers. Time passes.

Alarms sound. Alarms continue sounding. Voice announces that they're investigating, and will let us know if it's a real emergency. Alarms continue sounding, sounding, and sounding. I unplug cell phone and laptop, half-preparing for a speedy exit. Observation suggests it's probably not a real emergency. A fire truck pulls up on the tarmac. It appears to be in wait-and-assess mode. Police officer walks by. I miss the part in the lobby, where firefighters come in carrying hoses.

Eventually alarms stop. Voice announces:

"All areas of the terminal are designated 'no smoking' areas. Thank you for your cooperation."

Would-be passengers laugh and clap lightly.

More people start arriving. At least some of them have real seats on the flight I'm hoping to board. Others are on standby, like me. Waiting continues, as do the good conversations. I help one standby passenger looking to get to Kansas City check out seat availability on other airlines. He takes flight info and heads back to the main check-in area looking for something with more certainty. I hear of the reporter in the lobby, asking passengers bounced from my canceled flight their opinions about the flight being canceled. From the questions asked, it appears the so-called "mechanical difficulty" may instead be a labor dispute/problem/action.

Followed by the flight not being posted in the gate area, an announced delay...with no information regarding the length of the delay, through checking flight status online suggests it's probably not horrible. Etc. Etc.

And, gee, I haven't even talked about the TSA search of my carry-on bag. It was the most thorough of the dozen or so searches I've had through the years. With the clearest verbal instructions ever. Nice.

As for the rest of it...well, not so nice. Nothing awful. So far. But nothing that makes me sorry I'm not flying as much as I was a few years back, either.

Further updates as there's news. I like the free wireless at the Hartford airport better. The T-mobile day pass isn't so bad, but the way they make me keep logging in every few minutes is tiresome.

Onward.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

ugh. it seems almost everyone coming here to Calgary had some sort of delay/travelling snafu. hope you get here - it will be nice to see you!

[lyzard13.livejournal.com]

well, guess who wasn't logged in :) ?

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the encouragement and reminder that you're one of the many people I'll be glad to see even if I do miss most of the convention by not getting there until dinnertime Saturday. My brain is deeply in toss-up mode, comparing the value of the trip after missing so much of the convention to just bailing on the whole thing.

Update: No possibility on this standby. Talking with friends in Chicago...may be able to get there tonight, and on an earlier flight tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

Actually about a previous post

[markiv1111.livejournal.com]

Geri, you posted a while back about the coincidence of names -- were there three people named Guy Davis? I think I told you some years back that there was an ongoing series of Irish dances, in Milwaukee, whose host/organizer was a man named Jerry Sullivan. (I tried pretty hard to get to the root of something strange that happened to me some years back -- the highway patrol tracking me down because they really, really wanted to talk to me about my sister, Rebecca, who lives in South Dakota. I have no sister named Rebecca and no close family in South Dakota. It took me some time to convince them of this. One of my friends at work suggested that there was somebody else named Nathan Bucklin who really did have a sister named Rebecca in South Dakota, and this other Nathan's sister had been hurt in a traffic accident. This makes a whole lot of sense, but none of us could locate another Nathan Bucklin. I guess we'll never know.)

Nate

Re: Actually about a previous post

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Yep, the Guy Davis 3 post went up late last night.

Yes, the highway patrol story does sound like a mix-up with another person with the same name. There used to be a Geri Sullivan who lived in a rental apartment on First Avenue South, just a few blocks from Toad Hall. She was apparently less than stellar at paying the rent; I used to receive calls about my overdue rent there, and other credit problems of hers, too. Nope; not me. The first call (about overdue rent) was downright confusing -- I woke from a sound sleep, and the person calling wasn't immediately clear about what I supposedly owed rent on.

Try Googling your name -- there's a historic Nathan Bucklin farmhouse on the Kitsap Peninsula, none too far from Seattle. And the Nathan Bucklin Trail there, too. Plus some links to Nathan Bucklins of yore.

Re: Actually about a previous post

[(Anonymous)]

The Nathan Bucklin stuff you located when googling for my name would constitute references to my great-grandfather, for whom I was named. Even so, I think googling for "Nathan" rather than "Nate" would be interesting. (I have googled for Nate, not for Nathan.) My father and I were certainly under the impression that our ancestor was given a name common in the Bucklin family at the time, and my uncle Buck (Nathan Erwin Bucklin, who lived on Bainbridge Island) was named after his grandfather, my great-grandfather. So *some* of the genealogy is known -- but I'm sure there's more. Thanks for checking.

Nate