I have been firmly planted in 10B since 9:45 pm ish.
We aren’t expected to take off for another 2 or so hours.
Which means I’m getting home around 3 am.
I do have my Sprint Wifi card.
And 5 minutes left on my laptop.
Otherwise I may have gone insane.
Spill it.? Longest time you have been stuck on a plane?
Please make me feel better.
==
UPDATE: I changed this because shortly after I wrote it, they ended up canceling my flight completely.? I probably take between 30-50 trips a year and have since I can remember, and have always just been really lucky to never have a cancelation.
Normally, I am really compulsive about packing.? I keep an extra change of clothes with me, a few toiletries and something to keep me entertained if my flight is delayed.? Since this was a really “quick” trip to Dallas, I didn’t do any of that.? I made the mistake of checking my bag too (I had too many liquids) so it is now somewhere in Nashville and I am at a hotel by the airport.
Very wrinkled.
The best part about the night were the FIVE cabs that were operating. No shuttles. No limos.? Nothing but these five cabs.? He charged the EIGHT of us who rode with him $35 to drive about a mile to the hotel.? I got to know the guy next to me VERY well as we slipped all over the highways.? I started getting nervous when I saw we were passing all the other cabs.? And when I smelled the driver’s very liquor soaked breath…
But we arrived at the hotel safely and I just woke up a few minutes ago…looks like my flight back to BNA is only 10 minutes delayed right now…
It’s been an adventure!!
Comments
28 responses to “What I look like at Midnight while on a Plane in the Ice”
What, no frizzy hair? I think you still need to show all of us the frizzy hair! Talk about being real!!! : )
Glad you got some rest at least. Someone thought I was you pimping out your book in a chat room for the conference today…I laughed…hard. The book is great. Read half of it already today. Great meeting you yesterday. Hope you get home ok.
Anne, I feel for you as having been in same situation. You are handling very well. On the up side, thought you’d want to know that I have “pre-ordered” MCD from CBD.com and am anxiously awaiting its anticipated ship date of 2/10/09. Just thought you’d be interested that they are pre-ordering now.
Can’t wait to read. Good luck with your flight home. Nashville’s a beautiful town. I used to live in Sylvan Park.
Blessings,
RR
I pent 5 hours on a plane just waiting to take off! 2 hours at the gate 3 on the tarmas and 2 in the air! So a total of 7 hours on a plane… Plus I had to be atwork the next morning at 4:30 a.m…. my plane DID NOT arrive in Jacksonville, Fl until 3 so I drove home as fast as I could to shower and get back to the airport. Oh by the way, I used to work for AirTranAirways! The flight I was on was a U.S. Airways flight! Never again have I flown with them!
following a week on a cruise, i once spent 12 hours stuck in a layover in Milwaukee. i hadn’t seen land or the outside world for week at this point. i thought i was going to actually have an anxiety attack.
just think…ALL of those 30-50 flights a year, you probably barely remember anything about any of them…THIS flight (nightmare), will be a good story for you to tell for the rest of your life. the way i look at it, you win. :)
adventures rock!
Got your book yesterday! The person I bought it for read it in 1/2 a day!
about 2-3 hours. it was hot and crazy.
I had a cabbie like that in icy Tulsa a couple of years ago. Never been so scared in my life.
Longest sitting on a plane not in flight for me is about 2 and half hours. At least I was with my wife and not alone. But, it was Houston in the summer so the plane got really hot.
Six hours in a plane sitting on the tarmac in Boston. They handed out the soda and peanuts. No dinner. My son was pretty hungry. We weren’t allowed to use the restroom. I had a baby on my lap and had to change her dirty diaper in my seat. I wasn’t allowed to stand up to rock her when she fussed. I thought I was going to have a panic attack. My husband asked them to let us go back to the gate and get off. It was quite an ordeal. The saga ends with my husband being threatened to be arrested and David Bowie insisting that we go back to the gate. He’s my hero now! We took a train home and beat our luggage. Not fun, but we got a great story out of it. Hope today’s flight is smooth and easy.
I’ve been pretty lucky so far, of course, I don’t travel a whole lot. Longest was probably about and 1 to 1 1/2 in Paris at CDG…of course that is about a 12 hour flight to Atlanta so not a good way to start…yeah…6 hours…forget it…I’d try to get arrested to just to get off!
lame. i’m not sure which is worse. being redirected to palm springs (only an hour drive from my intended destination) and not being let off the plane because that’s not where we’re supposed to be. OR being stuck in the same situation in india. either way. never a good time.
I’m not sure I can beat Shalas story! But…6 hours I think was my longest time. I knew it was going to happen so I ate a grand breakfast at the airport at a sitdown restaurant. The plane was hardly full and I got a row of 3 seats to myself. It was such an awful trip that I didn’t care I was on a plane. I “slept” at the airport just to get away from where I was. I was happy to be leaving town….so I set up my Mac and dozed in and out of sleep as I watched Sleepless in Seattle! When we finally took off, the winds had died down enough to fly….but it was VERRRRY choppy and for a few moments I was thinking the plane was going flip right over! Alas, I got home safe and sound.
Never sat on a grounded plane, but did spend the 48 hours before Christmas stuck in a smoking room at the Days Inn in Ft. Wayne, IN. With a broken TV. I walked over twice a day to the one restaurant in the FW airport to get some food and stare mournfully at the departing flights board, then back to my room to watch DVDs on my laptop. Longest two days of my life–finally got out when my brother drove down from Chicago and together we got home on Christmas Eve night.
Fortunately I did have my luggage because I chased the airport guys who had it through the snow, up onto the bed of their pickup truck, and wrestled it away from them while they protested, “But you can get it at your final destination!” Suckers, Fort Wayne in a snowstorm is as final as it gets.
So…..I can relate. As noted above, everything in life is either a good experience or a good story. Looks like you got the latter this time.
I have my own collection of bad plane flight stories. I really dislike being stuck on a plane. I am glad you made it home safely!
BUT WHAT ABOUT YOUR BREAK OUT SESSION? Did it go ok? anything fun happen?
I was on my way to the Ukraine, alone at 18 years old, for a missions trip to work in some orphanages. I had gotten air-sick on my first flight of the morning out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and then got stuck in St. Louis sitting on the plane in on the tarmac for over eight hours. When we finally got in the air, we were supposed to go straight to JFK. However, we were bumped back and forth between Philadelphia and Baltimore for a few hours before actually landing and getting of the plane in Baltimore. We hung out there for a while, mean while I missed my connecting flight from JFK to Frankfurt. Once we got to JFK about midnight, I found out there were no more connecting flights to Frankfurt until noon the next day. So, I had to find a hotel in the Big Apple and take a taxi to my destination. The rest of the trip was seemingly uneventful and I made it to my location and back just fine. However, that was one crazy trip for an 18 year old. :)
10 minutes in el paso – have any of you actually been to el paso? 1 min = 1hr normal place time
Anne – Got your book in the mail and have been reading it all day. I can’t put it down. I’m being so helped. It’s snowing like crazy outside, so I’ve curled up and took the day off with your book. There’s so much I want to say to you, since I now feel like I know you so much better (that’s got to be weird for you). But let me just say, “Thank you. I really needed your book today.” Mark Pierce, 51-year-old church planter in Mansfield, Ohio.
My wife and I were flying to Michigan to visit family, we drove from Wichita to Kansas City for a cheaper flight, storms in the midwest had us sitting on the plane for 2.5 hours before we took off for our connecting flight in Detroit.
Storms in Detroit had us re-route to Saginaw. We sat on the runway in Saginaw for 2 hours, the plane lost it’s AC at that point, and it was July, muggy and hot. We finally got to Detroit (a little late) and had a 3 hour wait for our short flight to Grand Rapids.
On top of all that, they lost our luggage. After about 24 hours of being upset we laughed really hard about the whole ordeal… and it is a great story to tell people in “Worst Flight Ever” contests…
Going to Germany in 2007. Eight hour layover in Newark (EW!), THEN they tell us the flight is overbooked and they want 6 people to give up their seats (for which they were rewarding you rather nicely, actually). There were 8 of us going so we said we’d do it if they took all 8. Problem COULD HAVE BEEN SOLVED in minutes. Nope. Only 5. After 2 additional hours they decided to go ahead and board us even though we were still over booked. One more hour while they BEGGED and PLEADED for 2 more people to get off the plane. FINALLY they tell us we’re ready. BUT WAIT… since we were so incredibly delayed, we have to “wait” for a spot to open up for us to take off. THREE HOURS LATER we take off. We’re now leaving the US at roughly the time we were supposed to land in Germany. Oh and do any of you have ANY IDEA how unbelievably uncomfortable the seats on old Continental airplanes are???
I fly all the time on crazy routes, so I’ve had more than my fair share of delays and other nightmares. Last year was a particularly bad example; ice shut down DFW, so I was stuck for about 22 hours. For awhile, they told me it would be three days, but then they rerouted me to Des Moines, then to Chicago, where they put me on Turkish Airlines to Istanbul, where I got a connection to my original destination (a sad little place in the Balkans). I arrived almost exactly 24 hours late. My luggage arrived three days later.
Waiting it out at DFW is far more comfortable than a four-hour delay in a Congolese airport, though…
I have been on a plan for about 14 hours frm Jerusalem to New Jersey and boy was that torture. I would never suggest a direct route like that. My body was in a funk. And they tried to imitate daylight and nighttime but at the incorrect times which threw off my sleep schedule for the following few days…
I waited in Nashville to board for about 2 extra hours, then about 2 hours on the plane itself, then we took off and flew to Chicago and then circled Chicago for another hour. I thought I would never ever get to Chicago!
I feel your pain about spending the night in the hotel with nothing. Just be happy you got a room. Can you imagine sleeping in the airport? yuck. Glad you are safe.
I started MCD today and am already on page 108. If you could read the 60+ pages I have written you would see some eerie similarities in thinking……I’m underlinging like mad and have some questions written out in my margins for the discussion on Thursday…..a wonderful work, Anne, as I knew it would be.
4 1/2 days of straight travel… (La Paz, Bolivia to Miami, Miami to JFK, JFK to the U.A.E., and the U.A.E. to Johannesburg, South Africa).
It was rough, but worth the adventure. I took over 20 international flights this past year. All part of the World Race – a missions program breathing a generation to life and changing the world for KINGDOM.
Well, I thought my 14.5hrs non-stop from Chicago to Seoul, Korea (on top of the 2.5hr from Dallas-Chicago) was bad, but Matthew S’s 4.5 days worth was worse.
I live in South Africa as a missionary. Of my 3 legs home, my longest is 18.5 hours.
Oh what I do to see the ones I love, both ways!