Because it's so fun to look at the way my life progresses through airports.

Up at 6:45.  I keep forgetting St. Louis is so friggin' small and the traffic (outside the times when there's a car accident) actually moves. 

At the airport and through security by 9:30 after not rushing to check out of the hotel, stopping for coffee and returning the rental car.  But the flight isn't until 11:20 - ho-hum.  The flight leaves on time - Hurray!

Get to Louisville immediately see my flight to "Providence" is marked delayed from 3:45 to 5:15.  It's only now that I find out my flight is not direct to Providence. Silly me.  This is the first time I've flown Southwest.  Now I know - they do these short hops and stops.  This plane was headed to Baltimore first (something that was not quite mentioned on my itinerary when I made the reservations or I would certainly have opted for a different flight).

We finally got off the ground headed to BWI at 5:30.  We pull in at the gate - the Baltimore passengers get off, the Providence passengers get on.  They close the door, we push back and... stop.

Ten minutes later the captain gets on the intercom and tells us, they aren't allowing any take offs and landings due to weather so we're going to deplane. 

Out into the terminal.  Grab a bite to eat, get a Starbucks to stay awake. And wait.  And wait.

The Southwest peeps did a pretty good job with very little information. The Captain kept coming out to give us weather updates.  There is of course nothing they can do about the weather.   West bound cleared up first and they started allowing those flights to leave, but Northeast had to sit longer. 

About 9:30  they asked everyone to get back on the plane - there "might" be a window of time between storms to get out. We all got on the plane and waited... Then the Captain had to tell us his allotted time to work was nearly up.  He was trying to find out if they had another crew available. 

They did.  New crew gets on and we wait...

At 11:15pm we finally took off.  Got to Providence at 12:30am.  Got home at 1:45am.

I must say the crew at Southwest Airline was very good about the whole mess.   They did their level best to keep us up to date on the situation.  The flight attendants were exhausted, but persevered to the end with a smile. 

I certainly will fly their airline again, although I will very carefully check times and see what flights go where before I accept an itinerary.  For me, any stop is always fraught with the possibility of long delays.  As it is, I should have flown into and out of Midway and driven to St. Louis. I know that would have worked much better.  Or at least if I got stuck... there were more options.

Posted by: Teresa in Travel at 05:38 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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