Fear and Loathing in Dallas

Long long long flight home. Jessica took me to the airport, after a TGI dinner, Monday around 11pm. My AA-redeem-miles plane was supposed to take off at 12.45AM, but a tiny-petit-minor inconvenient forced the plane to remain parked at the gate until 1.30AM, when we were kindly asked to get out. Again waiting, but this time inside the airport. I didn’t care much, since I had a 13-hour layover in Dallas… so waiting here or waiting there is pretty much the same thing. I opened my Dell, and started watching the Prison Break DVDs Pablo burned for me a few weeks ago, just before getting married.

About an hour later, we board another plane and took off. I kept watching Prison Break throughout the whole flight, and landed at Dallas at 7.00 AM.

I went to my gate, plugged in my Dell again, and then, a not so pleasant surprised… I found out that they charge for internet! Indeed. The Dallas Airport has a fantabulous-billion-dollar Sky-Link, but no free internet. Anyway, I started watching Lost DVDs also burned by Pablo, for a while. Season 3 is amazing. Then lunch at Pizza Hut, and right after that, Cami kept his word and entertained me for almost two hours on the phone.

It was 2PM, I had been doing nothing at Dallas for over seven hours when an electric storm hit the city and they closed down the airport. They re-open it a few hours later.

See how airport planning at it finest works and follow this logic with me. The airport was closed for two hours. So every flight within those two hours is delay for two hours. All the flights in the following two hours are delay two hours. But all the flights right after 2.01 hours are supposed to be on time. I know... sound impossible... but I'm just typing what it says on the screens.

Long story short, it's almost 10pm now and time for me to board my flight... when they say it has been delayed. Not 10 minutes go by, they said it has been canceled. So they send all of us to the check-in counter to re-schedule for the following day. After 40 minutes in line, a fucking tornado warning in the area, so everybody must go to the basement. Again, like 20 minutes in the basement, then back to the check-in... and to the end of the line again. There, my luck changed a little bit and met some Argentineans, also as lost an annoyed as I was.

AA re-scheduled for the following day, via Miami. In order to start finishing the story, I will just say I spent the following 20 hours inside Dallas airport. It was a once in a life time experience... and hopefully it will stay like that.

My plane to Miami took off the following afternoon, and I barely made my connection at Miami airport. The only good thing was that, after two nights of no sleep at Dallas, I could slept pretty much all the way back home.

There are some pics here.