That is, we're home in the sense of being on American soil, but not otherwise.
Apparently it was a weekend of flight cancellations, spilling over into a new week of same. We emerged from Customs at JFK yesterday afternoon to find our own last connecting flight canceled, and --- well, about a thousand other people whose flights were all canceled, producing exactly the party atmosphere you'd imagine.
For about three hours we stood in the line to get to the line to speak to a ticket agent. For about two more hours after that we stood in the actual line to speak to the agent. What the agent told us, when we finally did speak to her, was that the earliest plane she could put us on was Thursday.
So we have these boarding passes for Thursday. But could we find some alternative for getting home sooner? Quick answer: no. Trains are sold out, unless you want to pay $800. BUSES are sold out. There are no rental cars for a thousand miles.
Also, all the budget hotels near the airport: booked solid. We could spend one uncomfortable night at the airport, but three?
So we spent some hours after we got out of line mulling the situation. Our ultimate thought was that if we could find a place to sleep for a couple of nights --- because tomorrow is really the earliest that we might entertain any prospect of getting out of New York --- then that would at least free up two airport lobby seats for other people to try to sleep on.
It was about midnight, I guess, that we arrived at this decision. My husband found something on Expedia, in Manhattan because everything else was booked, that looked like erring on the side of safety. So we went there.
Before we left the airport, my husband called the hotel front desk not once but twice, to make sure the reservation was good. And when we got there, around 1:30 a.m., having been up since 5:45 a.m. in Bergen, which is six hours ahead of Eastern Daylight Time, and I'll let you do the math, you probably know how this sentence is going to end. We had paid the non-refundable money. We had the confirmation number. Was it in the hotel's reservation system? Reader, it was not.
To the overnight desk clerk's credit, we did get a room. We're in it now, and have slept and showered, so existence is looking a lot brighter than it was looking for a while. But it took nearly an hour of his frantically trying to call some higher-up at 1:30 in the morning to find out how to override the computer system, and apologizing at intervals to a lobby full of people in walking comas --- besides us, there were two girls from Panama who said they'd been up since Sunday, and one other group that staged a walkout, into the rain in the small hours, then realized that they had no place else to go and came back.
So, here we are. Our kids were proposing to drive up here and get us, like that would be a cheap option, but I don't think it really would be. It might be cheaper than this hotel, but only because lots of things would be cheaper than this hotel. Those things, unfortunately, do not include any available form of public transport, so as I say, here we are. Our plan is to keep calling the airline's customer-service number to see if we can't possibly get onto a flight tomorrow --- to somewhere like Atlanta, for example, where our children might conceivably come meet us.
Meanwhile, wearing today (and glad I brought wool dresses):
It is nice to be clean and rested and to feel a little pretty in the midst of inconvenience,which is really all these trials amount to.
PS: We are going out to walk around, because we are in New York. This might be a completely unplanned arm of our travels --- last night I said to my husband, "I wish I wanted to go to New York"--- but as it's become a part of the trip, we might as well enjoy it some.