Flying on your birthday: not advisable!

We’ve just got home and finished dinner, after a fairly miserable day of travelling. My advice: don’t fly on your birthday, it’s depressing!

Things didn’t start well when we got stuck in traffic on approch to the airport. The cabbie himself admitted that he’d been there not 15 minutes ago and it was perfectly clear. Just our luck!

Finally we got inside to the sight of people everywhere. It took us about 1/2hr to make our way to the front of the check-in counter. The guy we had seemed friendly enough, so I asked if we could have a birthday upgrade! Unfortunately he said, “sorry, I’d love to but first class is sold out, actually the flight is overbooked and you don’t even have 2 seats together”. Typical, this happens to us a lot lately!

Anyway, we made our way to the gate, only to find there was a gate change, so we had to walk back to the other end of the airport. Kristy bravely asked the girl at the counter if she could try to find us two seats together, and though she said she’d try, she didn’t look hopeful.

Next thing we get an announcement over the PA – “The maintenance crew is having trouble flushing something, sorry no further details.” What the?! All that meant for us was delays, about 1.5hr by the time we finally got on board.

We got a glimmer of hope just before we boarded, as the girl at the desk managed to swap us into two seats together. Unfortunately though, they were right at the tail end of the plane – but we were happy to be sitting together so we took what we could. Of course, things don’t go right for us for too long – being at the tail end of the plane meant we were last to be served on the food run. And guess what? There wasn’t enough food to go around, and so we had to go without. Having only eaten a Krispy Kreme donut and a banana each all day, we weren’t happy campers!

Well, there wasn’t much left to go wrong after that. We counted ourselves lucky that they didn’t lose our luggage (though they did break my suitcase on our outbound flight), and that our journey home on the subway was uneventful. And we were extra thankful that our local Indian restaurant was still open, as that meant dinner was quickly taken care of.

As I said – flying is no way to spend your birthday! Thank goodness to my beautiful trooper of a wife that kept me in high spirits all day; without her I would have been miserable.

And staying on the bright side – a HUGE thank you to everyone for the cards, phone calls, presents, and e-mails wishing me a happy birthday! It really is no stretch to say that you all made my day, and I wish that I could have been partying with you all instead of flying! I endeavor to reply to/thank everyone individually, but it’s past midnight already so it will have to wait until at least tomorrow. Sorry!

Oh, and lots of piccies and news from Vegas, which – aside from the travel – was a fantastic vacation… but again, that will have to wait until a bit later.