Airline Insanity

I've finally arrived at my hotel in Portsmouth, NH, my destination hotel for my "Living on Live Foods" course. It was quite the ordeal to get here, let me tell you. My "non-stop" flight from Syracuse, NY to Boston, MA (which is about an hour from Kittery, ME the location of my course) which was supposed to take all of 1 hour and 22 minutes turned into over 4 hours of plane-hopping and wondering if I was going to make it here today at all. I arrived in Syracuse airport several hours before my flight, and my flight arrived on time, but when it came time for the flight to leave at 4:50 pm, the problems started. They couldn't get the airplane door closed, LOL. My seat was right up front where they were having problems, and when you hear the airline staff that's working on the plane say things like "Uh-oh!" and "the piece fell off" (!!!!), you know you're in trouble, LOL. They told us to exit the plane (I didn't complain, seeing as there were pieces falling off of it) and that they were calling maintenance and would update us on what's going on. Back into the airport we went. I didn't have a good feeling about them fixing that plane any time soon (and the flight did get cancelled shortly thereafter) so I transferred to another flight, with a stop-over in NYC, with a flight from NYC to Boston not leaving until 9:00 pm and arriving in Boston at 10:00 pm! I boarded the new plane in Syracuse just in time. Plane #2 pulls out, gets onto the runway and stops. The pilot advises us we're delayed and not cleared for take-off due to "traffic" and the plane sits on the runway for 45 minutes before we get going. This is 7:00 pm now and I'm supposed to be in Boston already, and I'm not even at my stop-over location yet. Then the pilot announces that there is a 8:00 pm and a 9:00 pm connection to Boston. I don't know why the airport attendant put me on the 9:00 if there was an 8:00 but I decide as soon as we get to NYC I'm going to see if I can get on the 8:00 because my roommate for the week was getting into Boston at 8:00 and she thinks I'm already there because my flight was supposed to arrive in Boston at 6:12 pm. Flight #2 pulls into LaGuardia airport (NYC) at 7:45 pm. I'm told the gate for the 8:00 flight is on the other end of the airport (of course, LOL). I'm out of my seat the second the seatbelt sign comes off and ready to go. Then I hear a commotion near the door. Apparently there's no gate attendant to escort us off the plane so we're not allowed off yet. After a five minute wait we're allowed to leave and it's now 7:50 pm. So, a few of us are bolting out of the plane, and literally running through the airport to get to the Gate for the 8:00 Boston flight. I felt like I was shooting a movie or something and it wasn't actually real, LOL. Then this really cool dude in like a 3 or 4 row golf cart pulls up and asks me if I'm going to Gate 20 (I was) and he tells me to hop in and he zips us past several gates and we just make the flight. What a cool job that guy has. :) After that it was pretty uneventful and I arrived in Boston on flight #3 before 9:00, LOL. I think all that was worth it just to be zipped through the airport on a golf cart, even though the ride was less than a minute. Okay, maybe not..... I'm really tired and a little delirious, actually.... Good night. :)