The best planning and organizing can't overcome the fickleness of our airline system. We awoke Tuesday morning with everything set for our trip to California. Meisha was to take us to the airport in Ithaca so we didn't have to pay for long-term parking. This was not to be. Up[on checking my E-mail, we discovered that the flight from Ithaca to Newark had been cancelled. The options on United Airline's offered nothing in flights from nearby airports and I spent over 35 minutes listening to canned music on their phone line before giving up. It was still early enough, so we decided to drive to Newark. I found a nearby private long-tern parking lot with good reviews and reasonable rates and we were soon on the road. We missed a turn or two in our attempt to find the parking lot, but soon we were being shuttled to Terminal C. Low an behold, the computer would not allow us to check in. We had to get in a special line. We inched forward--very slowly. When it was our turn, we found out that United had cancelled our reservations because we had not told them we were driving to Newark to catch the flight to San Francisco. We explained that we tried. The attendant was sympathetic but she had to call someone else to deal with our issue and that person put her on hold--for a long time. Eventually we found ourselves going through security. After some lunch we joined to crowds of people waiting to board. It was so poorly organized that we, among many others, kept having to move out of the way over and over again as motored trams, people being pushed in wheelchairs and others going from gate to gate. Then came the announcement for the first delay--then the second for a different reason. Finally we all started boarding. When everyone was in the plane, we learned of another delay, and then another, before it was announced that we couldn't leave now because of the thunderstorm coming through. Yes, after delays amounting to over two hours, we were finally in the air. That when things regained normalcy.
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