Ok, folks, I have 21% battery on this mini lap top, so let's see how much I can crank out about day 1 of our trip before this thing shuts off on me here on the MegaBus...hurray for WIFI on the road.
Sooo, the adventure really started last night when I finally finished packing after days of procrastination, not wanting to even think about the packing process—my least favorite part of traveling. I left my house and headed over to my friend and travel companion's (Grace's) house around 10:30pm. I was supposed to be there around 8, but Grace and I have a wonderful understanding about "ish" timing; she's really the one who introduced me to the concept of Mexican Standard Time and even Grace Standard Time, so the 10:30 arrival with the 8ish plan, was definitely still on time.
Once there, her boyfriend, Jardiel, helped me weigh my bag to ensure it was close to the 20 to 25 kilo limit, which I was right at and verging on the maximum, so it required a little rearranging. I also decided it was necessary to add an additional carry-on to distribute some items. Even with those efforts, I still had to remove two pairs of jeans, much to my chagrin, this morning at the airport because I was just over the limit on their scale. Grace's mom promised to take good care of them for me. While I am an avid traveler, packing is my achilles heal because I like options and back-ups for clothing AND I have a wonderfully large suitcase that does not encourage me to edit my selections at all. I still have my fingers crossed that my bag will be allowed on our internal flights in China where Grace has read the weight limit is 5 kilos less...here's hoping a big smile will get my bag on those legs of the trip. We shall see!
I had a brief 4-hour sleep in Grace's pink hammock, which is becoming our pre-travel tradition now since our trip to Mexico City earlier this year, before waking up at 4 am so we could take showers and get to the airport by 5:30am with the help of Grace's parents. Everything went smoothly with check-in besides having to give up my 2 pairs of jeans and we got on the plane on schedule for the 7am departure. Everything looked good, until 7am came and went and we continued to sit on the tarmac and not pull away from the gate. The pilot informed us about half an hour later that there was a mechanical issue with some part of the engine being stuck open, but they were getting a mechanic out there and we should be pushing off in "10 minutes". I don’t know if it is just me, but I hate those kind of announcements. I wish they’d just lie to me and tell me that there’s a family of bunny rabbits blocking our way and we need to wait for them to move before we can depart. I don’t want to know anything is wrong with my plane…ignorance is bliss! Well fast forward 2 hours and 5 more "10 minutes more" announcements, and we were still sitting on that plane. Well, I admittedly had been dozing, but we hadn't budged an inch, and it was evident that the passengers were getting antsy and hungry. At that point, the airline offered to let people get off the plane and have a snack in the waiting area while they continued to work on the issue. We knew at that point our connection to Boston out of Houston would be missed because we had a 2- hour connection time scheduled, so we accepted our fate and disembarked to get our sickeningly sweet, sticky muffins and stretch our legs. Thankfully we planned our journey to the US with lots of buffer time built in for these types of things, and with our flight to China out of NYC not until 4pm tomorrow, we knew we’d be alright.
We got back on the plane about an hour later, and there was yet another small delay while “paperwork for our new flight times and scheduling were being processed and while we got clearance from air traffic control”. That was the story the pilot was telling us at least. My favorite quote of the day came when he got to his 3rd announcement on this delay and finally admitted “ok, I have no idea when we’ll be cleared for takeoff, but hopefully soon.” So for the first time in 3 and half hours, we finally lost the “10 minutes more” message and got a real honest announcement, which at least made us laugh. It was what it was—when traveling, you must expect delays!
We landed in Houston just prior to a downpour and electrical storm, which made for a slightly bumpy landing, but definitely not the worst I’ve been through. Nothing like the landing of our single-prop engine plane during a storm while visiting the island of Mangaia in the middle of the Pacific back during my semester abroad. That landing scared the bejeezus out of me when we had to make 3 attempts at the sand runway before touching down and lost good amounts of altitude over and over again. The worst part of this storm was the lightening hitting the airport 3 times after we got off and knocking out power as well as preventing the ground crew from unloading the plane for an hour. Hurray for more delays! Grace and I sat right down on the floor near the luggage belt and waited patiently. We had already made it through immigration in truthfully record time for Houston since our plane was the only one being processed at that time. All we could do at that point was wait. The Continental Airlines rep also had already given us new boarding passes for a supposedly 3:50pm flight up to Boston out of gate C42. We had just under 2 hours, so we figured we were still golden.
Once the storm passed and our bags came through, we walked through customs and on to talk to the Continental customer service rep to see if they could do anything special for us due to the mechanical delays from the morning. I was hoping maybe in compensation they’d agree to put us on a flight directly to JFK so we could cut out the 4 hour bus ride (Boston to New York) that we already had planned, but it was not to be. My negotiating skills proved fruitless since our tickets were “only good for Boston”, and they were not willing to make a change. Bums! I did insist that they honor the food vouchers that had been offered on the plane, which the rep tried to get out of by saying that wasn’t standard for “weather delay.” I quickly corrected her and said, “no, no, no, it was definitely a mechanical problem with the plane,” so I firmly stated that we were entitled to some compensation. Sometimes, you just have to stand up for your consumer’s rights. PLUS, we were hungry! That 15 minute wait in line yielded two vouchers for $8 each, so about a dollar a minute, not too bad when you think about it. We put those vouchers to good use on some delicious turkey burgers from a retro-style diner in the airport.
By the time the waitress gave us the burgers and conveniently forgot to pack the $3 bottle of water that we paid for in the bag, we realized that we needed to book it through the airport to get to the gate written on our boarding pass (C42) in order to make it there for the boarding time in less than 10 minutes. So off we went, burgers in hand, not quite old-school OJ Simpson-style airport dashing, but definitely hoofing it through the E terminal and on to the C terminal. We arrived at our designated gate just a few minutes late, but we were greeted with a board listing Los Angeles as the destination. So I ran over to the big departures board, and lo and behold, found out our gate had been changed to E10, one of the very first gates we had passed. Cursing under our breaths and stomachs growling, we took off back down the concourse for the new gate. At least all that rushing hopefully burned off a few calories, since we’re doing a lot of sitting during all of our flights & bus rides. Once at E10, we learned that the boarding time had been pushed back 20 minutes due to the storm, thankfully, so we were able to sit down and eat the burgers and did our best not to absolutely inhale them. And let me just say, they were glorious!
Pretty much from there on, things have run smoothly. The Boston to Houston flight arrived around 9pm and my friend Samantha picked us up at the airport. She took us back to her place in Somerville so we could chill with her and another friend for an hour or so, and then she drove us to Boston’s South Station so we could catch our midnight MegaBus to New York (an absolute steal considering is was only $6 for the ticket and the bus has WIFI). Grace and I made friends with a Chilean guy traveling on his own in line waiting to board, and we were able to find the last two seats next to each other on the top floor of the double decker bus(they weren’t kidding when they called it a “Mega”bus).
Now we’re on the road to NYC and should be arriving around 4am. The goal is to get to the 24-hour diner that I know of by Penn Station called TikToc and hang out there until the Starbucks start opening so we can move over to one of those and set-up camp for the day with our luggage in a place with free WIFI and caffeine.
Long story short (already too late, I know), it was an eventful first day of our journey and definitely tiring. But there was nothing this Gringa & Yuca couldn’t handle. We are aware that we still won’t see a bed for over 24 more hours, and there is a 14-hour flight and at least a fun-attempt at communicating with a Chinese-speaking taxi driver to get us to the correct hotel in Beijing before we see that bed. But once we make it to that bed, trust me, Grace and I will be in HEAVEN. Stay tuned for tales from an extremely sleep-deprived day 2…
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