i had the chance to go to florida for a week last week, and man, some funny things happened. just wanted to share the exciting adventures of the day and a half it took to get there.
we got to kansas city on thursday at about 2:30pm. by "got to kansas city," i mean we drove the last 20 minutes through hazardous rain that was literally blowing sideways. flash floods were everywhere and it was DARK... it could have been 7:30pm and we wouldn't have known the difference. noelle and i kept saying "i have never seen anything like this before!" it was the worst storm i have ever been in, and thus, we were wondering about our flight... scheduled to leave at 5:00 from the KCI airport. we arrive at the airport amid a hurricane and discover that our flight has been delayed an hour.. no big deal, because we will still have an hour before our connecting flight from memphis to tampa.
we grab dinner in the boulevard brewery at the airport and hear lots of businessmen lauding "no one is getting out of hear tonight!" in between lots of martinis and boisterious laughs. all we see is lighting and the look on each others faces that announce "this can't be happening, we just want to get to florida!"
we find our gate and gaze at a funny older man (think jerram-age) who is probably from belgium (he had a passport) wearing orange pants, a pink button down, and a blazer, eating grapes one at a time with his pinky finger up. and his front hair has the biggest wave ever. needless to say, our delay time keeps getting longer and longer. while we are waiting, we are encouraged by a cute little family with two very small children who are from kansas city, ks (we overheard some phone conversations) who are doing an INCREDIBLE job keeping their kids in line despite a 5+ hour flight delay. not fun in an airport, but they are managing. we were so impressed!
at 9:00pm, we board the plane. the first thing we see is belgium man sitting in first class. he already has a pillow behind his head, his eyes are shut, and he has a blue blanket wrapped around his neck. standard.
we are in the air for 3 1/2 hours on what should be a 2 hour flight, and noelle wakes up to (while i am kind of sleeping) an announcement: "sorry folks, we are passing over TEXAS (note, we are going from kc to memphis) and will be there in about an hour and a half. thanks for your patience." around midnight, we touch down and arrive at a deserted airport. we have to get new boarding passes for a flight the next morning since we have obviously missed our connecting flight, so we have to leave the gate. somehow we get "overnight bags" complete with an XL t-shirt and a finger push-up deodorant and are told that the safest place to sleep is over by the arby's.
alas, we see a women with an air-mattress, pillow, and pea green blanket and wonder if she has just thought to bring this with her??? or does she know something we don't? noelle asks, and she looks a little bewildered but tells us to just call the airport police from the beige phone on the wall and ask for one ourselves. apparently there is a whole stockpile of mattresses and blankets in the memphis airport! an hour later, a security guard wanders over and retrieves some for us. we decide that in 2 or 3 hours the arby's scenario will be hopping with people trying to get on flights, and since i have stumbled into a bathroom with a quaint little sitting room in it earlier, we decide to drag our air mattresses across the entire airport to find it and sleep in the quietest place we know of. well, we get yelled at and are told that the best place to sleep is upstairs on a second floor that goes around the entire perimeter of the lobby. we are looking down at the whole airport, and by now it is close to 2am. a man had given us "sani-wipes" to wipe down our mattresses, so we did that and got settled for the night in our too-big t-shirts for a night of sleeping in the memphis airport.
we wake up at 4:30am to a congested airport and we are just sleeping there, looking at them. hilarious. we sleep on and off in this public place until 8am and get up, people are kind of looking at us funny, and we take our overnight kits to the bathroom that we earlier had gotten kicked out of. we grab some coffee and catch our flight to florida.
it was a night. :)
