Ants on a Plane

September 27, 2006

10:36AM PST – 1:36PM EST

It’s been a crazy, crazy adventure for me. Last report, I had been stuck at the Chicago O’Hare airport for multiple hours. Well, my flight actually ended up getting cancelled around 8PM EST. I was scrambling, cause I had an extremely important meeting the next morning at 9AM in Camden, SC. I was calling up Boeing Travel, my lead, and checking times and information. There was nothing coming to there, and then I was ready to get a hotel in Chicago to stay the night and telecom into the meeting the next day. Then my lead calls me back up and says there was one final flight flying out to Charlotte, NC at 9PM. I rushed back to the United counter and got myself on standby.

Even better, the flight got delayed, and delayed and finally was ready an hour later. I was able to get a seat and flew off to Charlotte, not really sure what I was going to do next. See, I had a rental car for Columbia Airport in South Carolina, and by then it might have been too late to get a rental. But my lead took care of that for me while I was in the air and reserved me a car, but I had to get there before 1AM. So my flight touched down around 12:30am, and I’m cruising to find the rental car location and finally get a car at the Hertz. Phew. But its not over.

See I also cancelled my hotel reservations and had been in constant phone communicating with my traveling team there. They were able to get me the room back at the hotel. (They themselves were all delayed by multiple hours on flights too) So I got the car and drove 95mi to the Columbia, SC area, and got lost. The mapquest directions I wrote than hurriedly at the airport (cause my laptop battery was borderline dead) were wrong! Well… not exactly.

First of all, the roads in South Carolina suck. They are pitch black without any street lights anywhere, not even on on- and off-ramps!! To top that off, they don’t give you any forewarning that an exit is coming up! When you see the sign, you turn! Blindly too, since there are no lights, and it’s great because the on ramps are always sharp turns. It would be so easy to just not see the turn and go straight into the ditch, which almost happened to me a few times.

So it’s about 2am when I’m nearing the area, and so I’m following my mapquest directions to the wrong location! Apparently there are TWO Clemson Rd and 10th intersections in the Columbia area! WTF? And both of these places have a “WAFFLE HOUSE” at them. This place is some Denny’s like diner. Sigh! So confusing. I finally found my way to the right place around 3:30am and got about 1 hour of total sleep before I had to get up for my meeting. It was exhausting yet I was not tired the whole day, surprisingly.

After the meeting with the supplier, I had another 3 hours of meetings to telecon into at the hotel. Eek. Finally, we had dinner, and then I went out to find some place to hang out. I ended up going to the University of South Carolina area and went to Jillian’s. Sigh, nightlife is dead here. This place actually had a pretty good crowd though.

Anyway, this morning I get directions to the airport from the hotel concierge, and of course – its wrong! So I’m driving and about 30 miles later I’m looking at a really bad mapquest map and realize this ain’t right. So I turned off the freeway got back on going the opposite direction and flying to find the airport. See, it was about 11:35am and my flight was at 12:46PM and I still had to drop the rental car.

I finally did find the aiport, rushed through the rental (w/o refilling gas), and rushed to the airport lobby to get my ticket, literally about 30 seconds away from being too late. You have to check-in at least 30mins before, and I was in-line at about 12:15pm!!

Anyway, I’m finally in the air now to O’Hare again. Hopefully it’s not a nightmare there…