Friday, August 04, 2006
Okay, I’m ready to
confess…
I never followed up with my recounting of my Arizona trip. Why, you might ask? Well, to be honest, I was embarrassed. Now, don’t get me wrong…I had a great time throughout most of the trip. My embarrassment began on the day that we were supposed to leave. I should point out, I suppose, that I was in charge of booking absolutely everything, and left in charge of instructing my mother and stepfather how best to navigate the airports, retrieve the rental car, etc. due to their lack of travel experience. Alright, now for my culpability. On Monday, July 10th, we were scheduled to leave Arizona from the Phoenix-Sky Harbor Int’l Airport. I could have sworn that we were scheduled to leave at around 9pm. Of course, what I should have done is pull out our itinerary and confirm this, but lamentably, I did not. So, when we arrived early (or so I thought) to the airport to check in, we were unfortunately surprised to learn that our plane was at that exact moment leaving the airport (5:25pm). Great, now what we supposed to do? By this time, I was quite surly (mostly because I knew our situation was entirely my fault). I was told that I had to call a MLT Vacations customer service number due to some issues that I won’t go into here. When I finally got a hold of someone (after 10 minutes of listening to Muzak), I could hear them, but they obviously couldn’t hear me and they hung up on me! I called back, and again after waiting for 15 minutes, the same problem occurred and she again hung up on me. I made my mother call back, and the exact same thing happened. Finally, the NWA worker at the desk took pity on my and let me use their cordless phone. After finally reaching a representative, things got sorted out and we were issued tickets on the next flight out. However, instead of the nonstop flight that we had been booked on, we now had to have a layover in Detroit, MI.
Another problem with our new flight is that it didn’t leave until after 11pm that night (which was about 6 hour away). There is nothing to really entertain someone within the Phoenix-Sky Harbor airport, so this time went by very S-L-O-W-L-Y. However, one good thing to mention is that the Phoenix airport is one of the few airports that actually offer *FREE* wi-fi to passengers. I surfed until my laptop’s battery died.
We finally go on the plane and began our journey home. We arrived in the Detroit airport in the wee hours of the morning and had to wait another 3 hours or so for our final connection to Minneapolis. In the mean time, we wandered around the airport, and I have to commend it…the place was quite clean and had an impressive tram running quietly overhead to connect passengers with other terminals. At long last, our plane boarded and we headed home. Our flight arrived at the MSP airport at around 7:30am and we got to look forward to the rush hour commute home. *Sigh* Can travel never be easy and problem-free for me?