Well I'm in Winston-Salem... finally. (Very long)
Yesterday was Da Day From Hell. We headed out at about 1pm from the cottage [NH] to drive to the Boston airport. That part went fine. At the airport, we grabbed a bite to eat and then parted ways, Dan to fly to Cleveland, and me to fly to Greensboro, NC via Philadelphia. I was scheduled to arrive at Greensboro at about 11pm, at which point I was hoping that one of the Atlanta jugglers, most of whom drove up to NC rather than flying, would be able to pick me up at the airport in exchange for some gas money (Dan's parents had said they might be able to do it, for one) and bring me back to Winston-Salem (it's ~25 minutes. There is a shuttle bus, but it stops running at 7pm, and cab fare is $47). That was how it was supposed to go down. The sharp thinking and clever folk will have deduced by this point that it didn't exactly play out that way in reality.

Here is how it actually happened:

My flight out of Boston was supposed to be "5 or 10 minutes delayed" due to the incoming plane being a little late. This was a flight Boston → Philadelphia on US Air scheduled at 5:30. At the next gate over the Boston → Philadelphia 4:30 flight was still waiting for the plane to arrive, and was expected to leave some time after 6:30. The plane they were waiting for was coming from Philadelphia as well, which made me nervous. I didn't want to hear about delayed flights out of Philly.

"5 or 10 minutes" ended up being more like an hour and five minutes, most of which was spent sitting in the plane. I was fortunate enough to be sitting next to an unwashed teen boy who smelled like rancid cheese. Yay. I wasn't horribly worried at this point because I had a two-hour layover in Philadelphia before my 9:10 flight to Greensboro.

The previously referenced clever folk will sense that my confidence was ill-placed, and that worry would have been more appropriate.

After a four mile hike and a rather bizarre and long bus ride to the other end of the universe terminal, I arrived at gate F31 to check the status of my flight. (You see this coming, right?) It was... Delayed! (bum bum buuuuuummmm). Current estimated departure time was no longer 9:10 but rather 11:19. That's about a quarter of an hour later than I was supposed to *get in*. That would put me arriving at the airport after 1am, which would make it really unlikely that I could talk someone into driving out to pick me up. Well, I was back and forth on the phone with Dan through this (he was already at home*, the lucky bastard) and he called his parents while I was trying to figure out what to do at the airport. His dad said he was willing to come get me at 1am, but much later than that would be hard. Have I mentioned how cool his parents are? I owe them such a pile of favors at this point that it's a little daunting.

I did manage to talk the customer service desk into giving me a $10 dinner voucher, and then I sat in this bar & grill at the end of the terminal and had some fairly mediocre nachos (the only thing on the menu that could be twisted into something vegetarian) and read my book for a while. The nachos, not exactly spectacular freshly delivered, soon became soggy and gloppy and I gave up on them. Finally I was going to head back to the gate to check on the delay and see if it had gotten worse, but then either Dan called me or I called Dan and he looked it up online (I was waiting for the bill) and he said that it was showing my flight had been canceled. Oooooh shit. There was a 10:50 flight which wasn't listed as delayed, and he said I should see if I could get on that one, and gave me the 800 number for US Airways.

So I call them, and they said that the 10:50 flight was full, but I could go to the gate and try to get on standby. I paid (well, voucher-ed) the check and headed down to F26, where the 10:50 flight was supposed to leave from. They confirmed that my flight was indeed canceled and put me on the standby list, but they said it was a 50 seat plane, they already had 50 people checked in, and I was #9 on the standby list. Also, they said that the flight was likely to be delayed as well. Craaaaaap. Now, somewhere in all of this airport navigation I'd managed to whack my thumb, which until then had actually been healing nicely. I could see blood starting to collect underneath the Dermabond, and it hurt like hell all over again.

So I made my way back to the customer service desk. This was very smart of me because from accounts I heard later, the line got very, very long shortly after that. As it was I only had to wait for two people. I was re-booked onto a flight first thing in the morning. They said they could only give vouchers for 5 hotel rooms for my flight that was canceled, and they had to give priority to seniors or people traveling with kids. So she went to the gate to see if there were any stranded seniors or folks with kids, and I waited at the desk. Luckily there weren't any, so she filled out vouchers for me: a hotel voucher for the Ramada Inn, a(nother) $10 dinner voucher, and a $5 breakfast voucher. Yay, I got two dinner vouchers! The only thing that went my way all day, I think. Or it would have been, except that all the food places had already closed.

I teamed up with two guys from a canceled flight to Cincinati who had also just been given Ramada Inn vouchers and we set off in search of "Zone 4" at ground transportation, swapping horror stories of our day of travels. (Theirs was worse--they'd actually already been bumped off of a flight earlier in the day, plus they didn't have their luggage. At least I was all carry-on). After walking down a long corridor with pee-stained carpets (well, there were a lot of stains, and it smelled like pee, so I am sort of assuming here and putting two and two together) we found the correct section of curb in the smog filled taxi/shuttle/bus area and set about waiting. The two guys began contemplating the potential nutritional benefit of eating their meal vouchers, since they hadn't eaten since lunchtime.

We waited a long time. We started to wonder if, being close to midnight, we needed to call the Ramada Inn for a shuttle rather than one coming around automatically. It turns out it's a very good thing we decided to call and check, because the answer we got was rather important. And it had nothing to do with the shuttle. What they said was "well, we don't have any rooms available". What!? We talked amongst ourselves for a while and decided to call them back and verify... "I have a voucher..." "We don't have any rooms." "But doesn't the voucher mean that the airline reserved a room for me?" "No, they get a block of rooms every night, and we have already used all of them, and don't have any other rooms available." "So when they gave me a voucher, thinking they had 5 available to give out, that was just wishful thinking on their part?" "Yeah, pretty much." "Ok, well...uh, thanks."

Well doodie snacks! The three of us went back through Pee Corridor and into the airport proper. We all still had boarding passes with hopeless standby status and so we figured we could probably get through security and go back to the customer service desk. And we probably could have, except that the security checkpoint had closed for the night. As had the ticket counter. Evan (one of the guys--we were on a first name basis at this point) used the white courtesy telephone to try to get ahold of someone, and I used my cell phone to try the 800 number again. He wasn't able to get a person and the person I got to said they weren't able to do anything, that I'd have to talk to someone at the airport.

We found some security guard type woman at baggage claim who said she didn't have a number to call the customer service desk. We badgered her until she agreed to try to find the number for a manager (yes, she had to try to FIND a manager's number.) After a really long time, during which we were starting to think she'd ditched us, she came back out and said she'd gotten through and that someone was coming out to help us. This also took a long time. We passed the time watching various other US Airways employees come out of the terminal, obviously heading home for the day. "There's the pilot" Evan said of one especially unlikely looking guy in a US Air uniform. "There's the CEO" I said, of a roly poly man in a reflective orange vest. After what seemed like several years, "Kim" came out (we recognized her from the customer service desk) and reissued us vouchers for a Howard Johnson's about 15 minutes away. She had even called and made sure the shuttle was coming for us. "It's closer than the hotel in New Jersey we sent a lot of people to," she said, trying to make us feel better. She was totally serious, too.

We tromped back out to Zone 4, cringing through the Pee Area, and waited a mercifully short time, relatively speaking for the night, for the shuttle to arrive. It had a bunch of people on it who looked very familiar. Everyone had sort of bonded together with that sort of camaraderie that forms when you go through a hardship together. The people already on the shuttle (All refugees from canceled US Air flights, a handful from my own flight) told us that they'd been thinking that gosh, it was a really big airport, wasn't it? Until they saw us standing there and realized that they'd just made a giant loop and come back. Apparently after they'd been picked up at Zone 4 and the shuttle had started off, but before it had left the airport entirely, they'd been called to come back and get us.

The shuttle stopped at CVS on the way, because one of the women was traveling with a baby and had only brought enough formula for the flight. She also had a toddler asleep in a stroller. She got up to go into the store, her baby strapped to her chest, and several other people decided they wanted to go in as well (just about everyone was sans luggage, and therefore without things like toothbrushes and other basic necessities). Then Evan and his friend decided to see about getting some snacks. Eventually all of the passengers and then the driver got off and went into the store. All except for the toddler in the stroller. My toothpaste had been taken by the TSA people in Boston (I totally forgot it was in my bag--and they hadn't caught it when I flew out of Ohio last Tuesday) and so I'd have liked to go in and buy a little travel one, but I wasn't comfortable leaving this toddler in the unlocked shuttle all alone in the middle of god-knows-where. I had no idea what kind of area it was. I was a little freaked out that the lady had left the kid with the strangers (dwindling down to the singular of just one stranger--me) in the first place, but I felt like it would be wrong even if it technically wasn't my responsibility, so I stayed on the shuttle.

The HoJo's was decent but not wonderful. The restaurant was closed (of course) but the front desk guy was friendly and we were all sorted off into rooms. Once I got in my room I tried to connect to their "free wireless" to send out a couple of emails letting people know where I was, but while I was able to connect to the "HOJO" network, it did not give me access to the internet. I called the front desk but the guy just said that sometimes their router didn't work right and there wasn't anything he could do. He said to try the BestBuy network, that sometimes that worked. BestBuy was right next door and I'd already seen their network on my list, and tried to connect. The signal was too weak. I gave up.

I was exhausted but also sort of wound up from everything that had been happening, and all the stress and worry of trying to make it all work out. I decided to take a hot bath to try to relax so that I could sleep. I also decided that now that I could stop running around, I could finally take one of my Hydrocodone pills for my thumb, which was by now hurting really bad, all the way in the bone, all the way to my wrist. The area under the Dermabond was completely full of blood by that point, and looked like a huge blood blister. I could also barley bend my thumb. I welcomed the relief of the pain medication. I dug around in my purse and found the antibiotic (whoops, I would have forgotten to take it otherwise!) but I didn't see the other prescription. Then a glimmer of a memory twinkled to life in the back of my head. New Hampshire. My bedroom at the cottage, that morning, packing my suitcase. I'd heard something fall behind the bed. "I should go see what that was, right after I finish folding these shirts..." I'd thought to myself. But it had been a bit hectic packing and getting ready to leave, and by the time I'd finished folding my shirts I had completely forgotten about whatever had fallen off the bed. Thinking back, I'm pretty sure it sounded just about exactly like a small plastic bottle of Hydrocodone pills. Oh great.

I did take the bath, and it did feel nice, even if I did have to hold my left hand out of the water. And even if I did have to first evict a suspiciously curly black hair from the tub before I filled it. I got into bed, plugged in my cell phone to charge and set its alarm for 4:30am. The shuttle to the airport was at 5am (they only ran once an hour, and my flight was at 7:20). That meant if I fell asleep very quickly, I would get almost 3 hours of sleep. But of course I never fall asleep quickly, so it was more like 2 or 2½ hours. My phone woke me up all too soon and I got dressed, gathered my things, and shambled back out to the lobby. My fellow US Air refugees were gathering, looking about as groggy as I felt. The coffee in the lobby was a horrible crime against humanity and I only managed about three sips before throwing mine out.

The mood on the shuttle was surprisingly cheerful. Again, it's that "we're all pulling together in the face of adversity" thing, and we were trying to make the best of it. I used my $10 dinner voucher to get a slightly better breakfast at the airport. Emphasis on "slightly". After eating, after we'd been sitting at the gate for a little while, I tried to give away my $5 breakfast voucher to one of the other refugees, but nobody was hungry. I went to the newsstand and bought five candy bars with it instead. I'll use them as snacks this week.

Predictably, this flight was delayed. Fortunately it was only by about 15 or 20 minutes, and they made up half of that in the air so we landed only about 10 minutes past schedule. I was seated in 1F, which is the bulkhead. This worried me, because I had my carry-on suitcase and my laptop case (a Samsonite Spinner Mobile Office--I love it! I paid much less for it than this, though, on sale) and was worried about finding enough overhead space for them. Usually I put the laptop bag under the seat, but in the bulkhead you can't do that. One of my fellow refugees, assigned to a seat in row 2, kindly offered to put it under her seat, since she had no luggage at all other than her purse. I boarded the plane and immediately noticed a problem. This was a tiny plane--two seats on each side of the aisle, total of 50 seats. The overhead compartments were a joke--you'd be lucky to slide a magazine into them, let alone luggage. The flight attendant was surprised that the gate agent hadn't tagged my suitcase for gate-check, and offered to do it for me, as there was no way it was going to fit in the overheads, short of putting it through a wood chipper first. That left me with just the laptop case, which I was going to pass to my new buddy, as soon as she boarded.

The guy in the seat next to mine looked military to me, and probably about my age. He took one look at me, looked at my bag, and said "you're going to have to put that in the overhead" in a not very friendly voice. "It won't fit in the overhead, unfortunately," I said in a much nicer tone than his. "I'm just going to put it at my feet for a--" "--you can't put it there!" he interrupted me. Gee thanks, Mr. Obvious. "I'm not going to keep it there. I have a friend sitting further back, and she's going to put it under her seat. I'm just putting it here at my feet until she boards, in just a couple of minutes." I was still being friendly, but he glared at me as I reached across his legs to set it down at the foot of my seat, and then as I stepped across to get into my seat, he gave me a look like I'd just asked him to amputate one of his limbs or something. He was definitely Mr. Cranky Pants. When the lady boarded and I handed my laptop case to her, the guy again looked like he was being Incredibly Put Out and Horribly Inconvenienced. Maybe he needed to eat more fiber, I don't know. He then hogged the armrest for the whole flight and made me very uncomfortable.

During the night my thumb had actually bled all over the place--I guess the pressure under the Dermabond finally just gave way--and the evil side of me contemplated bleeding on the guy just out of spite, but I'm not evil enough to ever act on those impulses. Oh well.

I finally arrived in Greensboro! No way! It seemed like a miracle. Those of us from the HoJo Refugee Camp waved farewells to each other and went our separate ways. I text messaged Dan to find out the name of the shuttle, since I was arriving before 7pm and could actually make use of it. I got to the ground transportation area and went to a taxi information desk to inquire about it, on the off chance they knew anything. (Were there more than one shuttle or did they all go where I wanted, where did I catch it, etc.) Well it turns out that I'd have to call them, and they'd send out a shuttle for me (from wherever they keep them) which would take me to where the actual bus would pick me up. Then I'd have to wait for the next scheduled bus (they run once an hour) and then it would take me to Winston-Salem, and leave me about 3 blocks from my hotel. It was about 9:30am by then, and they said they thought it was unlikely I'd get to my hotel before noon.

Oh hell no. Another 3 hours of transit was NOT the happy message I wanted in my fortune cookie. I asked about taxi fares. Turns out the IJA had arranged a special rate for jugglers: $32 from the airport to the hotel (or the convention center, which was right across the street). The regular fare would be $47 and I was really freakin' tired and just wanted to GET THERE already. I said sure, I'll take it. I (pre)paid the guy right there and he gave me a receipt and some sort of ticket thing, and introduced me to the driver, who was milling around right next to the desk.

The driver helped me with one of my bags and we walked outside to where several taxis were parked. He beeped his key fob and the trunk opened... on a totally unmarked car parked next to the taxis. I'm a single woman traveling alone, and I was raised by a fairly paranoid single woman, so this did make my inner eyebrow raise a little. I looked at the guy again. He had no uniform, no hat, no nametag, nothing to mark him as a taxi driver. The car was totally unmarked. "Wow, doesn't look like the other taxis, does it," I remarked. "It's a new one and hasn't been done yet," was his reply. I peered in the window. No meter, no signage, no taxi driver license thingie... nothing. I was creeped out but I told myself "the guy at the taxi counter handed me off to this guy. He's obviously with the taxi company. Quit being such a sissy."

He loaded my bags into the trunk and then said we would wait a few minutes to see if we could get another passenger. Sure enough, about 5 minutes later another juggler showed up asking for a taxi. He paid his $32 and we got into the back seat together. My inner eyebrow twitched again. Don't you usually split the fare when you share a taxi? And I hadn't even been asked if I minded sharing it. Hell, if we'd just paid the normal rate of $47 and split it we'd only be paying $23.50 each. Oh well. Let it go. At least it was nice to have someone to talk to for the ride.

And so I finally arrived at my hotel. I checked in, and ran into Dan's dad in the lobby of the hotel. I chatted with him for a few minutes, though I'm sure in my sleep-deprived, stressed out, frazzled state I probably seemed like a total lunatic to him. I'll have to explain it to him later and apologize. I took my bags to my room and then went across the street to the convention center and got my registration packet, my badge, and my festival t-shirt. This year they also have "famous juggler trading cards" which is pretty neat. You get 5 each of two cards, and there are 10 cards total. So you keep one of each of your two and trade out the remaining 8 cards for the ones you don't have. I started with the Raspyni Brothers and Vova & Olga Galchenko, and have so far traded to get Robert Nelson (the Butterfly Man) and The Passing Zone.


So now I'm back in my room and trying to de-stress enough to take a nap. It's hard. Stuff like all of this travel stress really gets me wound up so that my brain won't shut off :(





*he saw FOUR deer in the yard, including two babies. Man, no fair.