Travel Issues

Well…there’s a lot to catch everyone up on. The last post I made included the information that while sitting in Orlando at the airport we received information that our flight to Waterloo was cancelled. Well that was the start to a very rough day. I am not nearly eloquent enough to describe the frustration and difficulty we faced but I am going to try. After we received that call we made phone calls to figure out our next step. We ended up calling the airline and arguing with them to get us on various connecting flights. Orlando to Dallas to Chicago to Des Moines to Waterloo to Cedar Rapids. It was a mess. Since there were two of us traveling, every single time they found a solution they’d go through the process of putting one of us on the plane’s manifest and by the time they got to enter the other, there were no spots left. This same thing happened three times. We eventually ended up on a flight to Des Moines where we would rent a car to Waterloo. We ran into quite a bit of difficulty with Hertz trying to charge us $400 as a fee for adjusting our $79 reservation. We decided to book a separate rental from Des Moines to Waterloo so we wouldn’t be charged. That worked out well in theory until our new flight was delayed AGAIN. This would have put us in Des Moines by 9:00pm and in Waterloo by 11:00pm. At the latest he could help us by midnight because that’s when the Hertz system would automatically count us as no-shows and charge us another $400. The problem was the Waterloo branch shut down at 9. It was a mess. We did a lot arguing with Hertz and after quite a bit of arguing we found a very nice Hertz manager named Andrew who was willing to come back to his store and reopen it when we landed. 

We finally got on a plane and landed in Iowa. Let me just say while I grew up in an area that gets cold and I always enjoyed snowboarding and sledding…Iowa has a whole new level of cold. It was the kind of cold that will change your whole outlook on life. I’ve admittedly been a bit spoiled from a weather standpoint living in Orlando but to go from 70s to -15 will make you question everything you know from global warming to the perseverance of the human spirit. 

When we first got to Iowa and got into a car, it felt like we were making some nice progress..little did we know.

When we finally landed in the Des Moines airport we checked out our car and tried to quickly get across the frozen plains of Iowa. About 3 minutes into our journey I noticed the transmission was having trouble picking up from gear to gear. The RPMs kept varying from 2 or 3 to red lining to normal. I have rented cars before and I realize that many people drive them like the valet drove Cameron’s Porsche in Ferris Bueller’s Day off, so I thought it would just be a little quirk along the way. Well eventually the car just had enough. It quit on the side of a highway in Northern Iowa at about 11:30pm…in 15 degree weather. We coasted to the side of the road and tried to get it started again.

At this point, Shannon thought it would be an awesome time to talk about a Stephen King book where a car attacked people. To give you a proper image of our mindset at this time, we had woken up around 5am this day, been in an airport or plane for about 18 hours, struggled with car rental people, and then when we finally had what we thought was a rope of hope to climb out of our own despair, it turned out the rope was as brittle as a single piece of uncooked spaghetti. It was frustrating. This is the point where Shannon started to cry. I think at least one of her tears froze as soon as it hit her cheek, which luckily for us, the cold on her cheek constricted her tear ducts eliminating her body’s function to cry. I don’t know if that’s true but I imagine it is because after a short while crying she was back to being a trooper. We got the car started again, drove another 15 minutes and then it died again. This repeated for the next two hours. After doing this, coasting (unable to stop for fear of never starting again) through red lights in the ghost town Iowa landscape we eventually ended up at Hertz at 12:00 exactly. The manager ended up getting us a nice car (personal qualifications for me calling it a nice car include but are not limited to the ability to work, and access to heat) and sent us on our way. We ended up at the hotel and ready for bed by about 1:45am. We had a scant 3 hours or so to sleep before we had perhaps the most important day our careers would ever see. But what was most important…we made it there. Will update with fair information later.