Inauspicious beginning

We left San Diego at 7:30 a.m. for New York with a change of planes in Atlanta. On the way to Atlanta we watched one of the movies I downloaded on my new IPad Air 2. The movie was Big Eyes, about Margaret Greene, the painter of the Big Eyes paintings--children with huge, sad eyes. Anyway, the flight was smooth and uneventful all the way to Atlanta. 

That's when all the trouble started. There was a half-hour delay before we got on the plane at Atlanta. Then when we got settled on the plane, they announced there would be a 2-hour delay because of bad weather in NY. They said we could disembark or stay on the plane. If we chose to get off, we would have to get new boarding passes to get back on. Most of us left the plane. Dennis and I got off the plane and checked in at the desk for new boarding passes. Of course there would be a delay before the boarding passes could be printed. 

It was about 5:30 p.m. by then and we thought we'd better get something to eat so we split a subway sandwich. We also had time to have a gelato. We finally were allowed back on the plane and flew off to our destination of La Guardia Airport. We watched another movie: Kill the Messenger, about the reporter who broke the Iran-Contra story during the Reagan administration. A thriller.

We had finished the movie and we thought we were ready to land when they announced they were circling the airport because of built-up traffic and bad weather. After going around and around for awhile, the pilot announced that La Guardia was closed and we were being diverted to Baltimore. As we were getting off the plane, they told us to check with the customer service desk to see about options for getting us to NY.

Because we were in the back of the plane, we ended up at the end of a long line of tired and disgruntled passengers. It was about 10 o'clock by then. People kept coming back from the customer service desk saying Southwest was telling everyone that there were no connections from Baltimore to any NY airport--ever. You can't  get from Baltimore to NY on Southwest Airlines. Eventually, we gave up and went to get our luggage and find a hotel for the night. We waited another hour for our luggage, which couldn't be unloaded because the containers were metal and there was lightning all around. 

Dennis got on the phone and made a reservation at the Microtel hotel near the airport. He also made reservations for the train to get us to NY in the morning. We finally got our luggage and went outside to meet the hotel shuttle. After 3 calls and nearly another hour we finally got loaded on the shuttle and taken to the hotel. By then it was after midnight EST.

We got about 4-5 hours of sleep then hopped on the shuttle, destination train station. The train ride was soothing after all yesterday's trauma. I wrote most of this blog on the train until it pulled into Penn Station. We rolled our bags off the train into the underground station, following most of the people up the stairs. 

Dennis said, "Everyone seems to be going that way, so we should probably go, too." I said, "Ok" and started going toward the stairs. I dragged my suitcase up the stairs with some difficulty and when I got to the top, I turned around and Dennis was nowhere to be found. Uh oh. I called him and he eventually found me. He went up the escalator on the other side of the stairs and I didn't know it. He thought it was all my fault because I didn't follow him and I thought it was all his fault because he was behind me and should have noticed I was going the wrong way. Oh, brother!

We eventually got over that and stood in another long line for the taxi. The taxi deposited us in front of our hotel and the situation started to improve.