sue_n_julia | Cabo, next year, Cabo

Well, this year's holiday was quite the adventure. See, we started out on December 20, flying through Denver.

We got to the airport early, only to find a tremendously long line. We got in the full-service line so we could find out what we needed to do about Vandal (who was travelling with us, since he needs to be medicated twice daily) only to be told that we could go through self-service. We got to self-service only to be told we needed full service. We got back in line at full service (and no one offered to let us return to our place -- where they saw us leave). Turns out the long line was because the Denver-Cancun flight was cancelled. After waiting for 30 minutes and moving two spaces up, we convinced self-service to take us -- the excuse for why we couldn't use self-service was that we needed to pay for the cat, which doesn't make sense as you have to pay for overweight at self-service. They told us there was a "chance" our connection could be cancelled. [Neither of us had paid any attention to the weather predictions, so this confused us - little did we know what was in store. -J]

We got to the gate as they called our seating section. We thought this boded well for the remainder of the trip, what folly! It takes longer than usual to load the plane because we had six (6) unaccompanied minors who were the LAST to be seated. After the safety instruction and pushing away from the gate, the pilot comes on and says, "I just want to let you know that we have plenty of fuel if we need to circle Denver a few times and plenty of fuel to divert to Grand Junction. There's a really good chance that most of your connections are cancelled, but we'll get you there. We can make an instrument landing as long as we have 600 feet of visibility."

WTF?!?!?!?!?!?!?

We landed a little late. The landing itself was okay, but taxiing was not. The first turn he made caused the back of the plane to fishtail/slew a little on the runway. It took four (4) tries to line us up at the gate -- they kept overshooting because of the ice!!

We were greeted by a wall of cancelled flights -- including ours! Julia and I turned on our cell phones. She ran for the rental cars as I waited in a three-gate long line for customer service. While I was waiting, my phone signalled that I had a message. It was from United, time-stamped at 6:49 (about 30-45 minutes after our first flight was to leave), telling me the connection was cancelled. We should never have been allowed to fly to Denver -- we should have been rebooked on another route.

Julia gets back with news that we've got a car, so we hotfoot it to baggage claim. Only they tell us we can't get our bags because they don't have the staff to get them off the plane -- even if we have medication (one traveller packed his heart meds) in it!!! Frontier and Continental had no problem getting bags to customers!

So we go to get the car. We opt for a full-size instead of a compact (we would have paid for a 4WD, but they didn't have any available) with all the insurance. Expensive, but we're covered for these roads.

After some interesting driving (and scraping the bottom of the car along the snow piled on a major road), we get to a Super 8 motel. I have to do the zoom-up/spin/back-up/repeat until I am at the top because the driveway wasn't plowed or shovelled. We check in, go get food at Denny's and then stop by the Conoco for snacks and other stuff for the evening as Denny's is closing at 5:00. So we spend too much time in a little, dumpy hotel room. We check in with United and get conflicting answers as to whether our luggage will go onto Cincinnati if we don't fly -- the soonest flight we could get confirmed was the 25th (one agent told us the Denver airport wasn't closed!!!!!).

[I had this dream that we'd be able to leave Thursday sometime, but once we got settled at the hotel, we realized that that was a pipe dream - all interstates north, south, and east were closed from mid-day Wednesday till late Thursday afternooon - J.]

The next day, they ask us if we are staying on another night. We tell them we are (no highways are open yet).They stop by a second time to ask us to pay for the second night as they don't have our credit card info available from yesterday! Then we discover the guests have to dig out their cars. They charged people $20 until 2:00 (checkout is noon) and a full night after that -- but they couldn't get their cars out!

Friday dawns and we leave. We stop by the airport and get told that we can't get our luggage because they don't have the people, but it will be on the next flight to Cincy and will probably beat us there.

The drive to Nebraska was not fun. I had three slides, one of which left me trying to not hit the car in front of me -- I had left five (5) car lengths between us and stopped with five (5) feet to spare! Four hours and 200 miles later we were in Nebraska. Yes, we went through Nebraska to get from Colorado to Tennessee (we moved my visit with my family until the end of the trip) because I-70 through Kansas was closed.

The drive was pretty much uneventful, if long. Saturday, we stop by Cincy to be told that no flights have gone from Denver to Cincy since the 20th so our luggage (that was guaranteed by three people that it would be there) isn't. We maunder on to Pulaski, TN, with a stop outside Nashville to get some clothes and food for Vandal. We had underclothes with us and a 3-day supply of food for him, but we are now on day 4 with no end in sight.

We make it to Julia's family's house. We immediate wash clothes and put on the new stuff we bought so we have clean stuff on. After digging out the car and two and a half days of driving, I swear our jeans could have walked around without us in them. Yick!

Christmas gets there and we exchange gifts -- everyone gives us stuff, but we don't have anything for them (it's in our luggage). I do a slide show about Julia's parents' trip to Washington when Julia's father jumps about 18 inches in the air and yelps! His pacemaker/defibrillator has gone off, shocking him (as it is designed to do [he's had congestive heart failure for over 10 years now -J]). As he is talking to one of his heart doctors, it goes of two more times in quick succession. We call 911 and get him to the local hospital so they can transfer him to Vanderbilt (in Nashville). During the wait, it goes off about 10 more times, and a couple more at Vanderbilt. Scary!

The cause of all this is tachycardia (at one point his heart was beating 243 times a minute!). The heart docs think he may have had a blockage in a minor blood vessel that was too small to see on the heart cath. They have him on an arrhythmia drug that seems to be working well (it's the second one they tried -- they didn't like the side effects of the first one). So he spent five days in the Vanderbilt cardiac ICU and went home (they didn't have a bed in the step-down unit, so he stayed there until he went home).

On the 26th, our bags finally arrive, much the worse for wear. One has a broken handle and some other damage, another has ceramics (packed in bubble wrap) broken, and the third has beads all through it. The bead were packed into one container that was placed in another. Both sets of containers were opened, emptied, and closed again. The bag looked ransacked! We gave the gifts that survived. *sigh* [My brother even kindly repaired some of the broken ceramics -J.]

We get safely to my family, exchange gifts, and get much fragile stuff in return. Those are coming via UPS!!!! I don't trust United anymore. The visit with my family went quite well, actually.

The excitement isn't over quite yet. Denver got hit by a second blizzard, but got that tucked away before it affected us.

We got to Cincy (we were flying there because it was halfway between our families -- not doing that again!) only to find that our tickets were zeroed (i.e. cancelled), even though we had confirmed them on the 24th!!!! They get the tickets back and we were on our way.

We got to Denver and discovered our Spokane connection was not the flight we thought it was -- it was two hours later! We couldn't get on the earlier flight, so we had to take our later flight. It was made later yet by the weather in Chicago because the plane we were going to use was scheduled to fly from Chicago to San Antonio to Denver to Spokane -- not the smartest routing ever. So we got in around 11:35 and got the bags after the new year had begun.

So we are home, exhausted! When I recover, I plan to provide United with a detailed analysis of their customer service failures with recommended corrective actions. And I will be sending pics of the guests digging themselves out to Super 8.

Next year, we should go to Cabo and do Christmas with the families in July!

Through it all, Vandal was quite the trooper. He got carsick once and got sick and Julia's parents' once -- we think that was the different food.

S