Happy New Year, everyone on this 1/1/11. Instead of watching the same dreary old countdown shows on TV (I can’t believe CNN keeps inviting Kathy Griffin back and that Anderson Cooper agrees to appear with her), we watched the Doctor Who marathon on BBC America.
My flash fiction story “Chain Reaction” was posted a few days ago on the New Scientist’s CultureLab blog. The theme for the story was “futures that never were.” And, yes, I did point out the error in the pronoun in the author bio.
The Stephen King Illustrated Companion is back on sale at Barnes & Noble’s web site. This time, the discount is 39%, which makes the price $14.99.
We had quite an adventure on our trip to eastern Canada. We left Houston at 6:00 a.m. on Boxing Day (Sunday, Dec. 26th) to fly to Moncton, N.B. via Newark. I knew the storm that had dumped all that rain on California was headed to the east coast as snow, but I figured we were ahead of it. In fact, we were. When we arrived in Newark, it wasn’t yet snowing. However, that didn’t stop them from canceling our flight to Moncton, the only one that day. We knew that if we stayed for the Monday flight we would be stuck. For a while we thought our only choice was to turn around to go back to Houston, but even’t that wasn’t a sure thing as the flights were either full or canceled.
Two disgruntled Continental employees at the customer service booth (they were supposed to be off but had been called in) managed to figure out a way to get us to our destination, flying to Montreal on Continental and Moncton on Air Canada. There was another couple in the same situation as us, and the two customer agents conspired to duplicate our itineraries. Through one of those odd bits of happenstance, we ran into that couple numerous times subsequently, and ended up on the same flights back to Houston later on in the week. (I later discovered that he’s a PRCA bareback riding champion named Clint Cannon, and was featured in a documentary film recently. The fact that he wore a cowboy hat should have been a tipoff.)
There were three flights from Newark to Montreal, but the first one was canceled already. While we were checking the monitors for our gate, the third one went red, leaving only ours. The flight was delayed by an hour so they could try to give people who were supposed to be on the third flight time to check in. Then we spent another half hour being deiced. We reached Montreal, but our luggage didn’t, even though the customer service reps had gone to great lengths to pass along our description to someone in Newark. (Another oddity—for the first time ever I wrote down the brand of our suitcase and made note of its color and defects while we were checking in at Houston. The Continental reps were impressed by how well we were able to describe it!)
We had to spend valuable time filling out paperwork and getting it stamped by customs in Montreal, then made a beeline across the entire airport to go through security again and make it to our gate. We got to the aircraft with seven minutes to spare. In Moncton, we had to fill out more luggage paperwork and wait on a mysteriously absent rental car booth clerk. By the time we set out on the two-hour drive to my sister’s house, it was nearly nine p.m. and we’d been on the road for sixteen hours. Thankfully, the roads were clear and the snow didn’t start until we were a couple of miles from our final destination.
Lessons learned: when you leave on a trip, make sure you’re wearing something you don’t mind having on for the next several days. We regularly checked the location of our bag, but it didn’t reach Moncton until Thursday morning. We picked it up at the airport after we checked in for our return trip.
There was a nice snowfall on Sunday night, only a few inches, just enough to turn the area into a winter wonderland. We awoke Monday morning to no power in the house, but it didn’t stay off long. Despite our lack of a change of clothes (I did laundry almost every morning), we had a nice visit with my siblings, nieces and grand-nieces and grand-nephews, some of whom I’d never met before. Ate wonderful, home-cooked food (including a lobster dinner). Defied the odds and gained no weight, so far as I can tell. Watched TV news about people stranded in New York and counted our blessings for not being included in that number—it was a close call. We were among the last flights to depart from Newark that day. Saw video of fields of luggage and despaired of ever seeing our bag again.
When we reached Moncton on Thursday afternoon for our return flight, we learned that it was two hours late because the inbound flight had mechanical problems. We would arrive in Newark around the time our Houston flight departed. We had no reason to rush back to Houston, so we weren’t distressed by the likelihood that we’d have to spend the night in a Newark hotel and return home the following afternoon (yesterday). We even joked about going to Times Square for New Years Eve. As I mentioned, we ran into the same couple at the airport. They had received their luggage two days earlier. We had a sort of Amazing Race vibe going on, a friendly rivalry for new routes. The young woman wasn’t happy to hear that we were booked on a 1:30 p.m. flight the following day because they were on one later in the afternoon.
They rushed us through customs in Newark like I’ve never seen before. They even skipped my fingerprinting. Our bag made it this time. We’d been told to drop it off at the transit lounge, but we figured we’d hold onto it since we we figured we’d be spending the night in a hotel. However, when we got to the customer service counter, they had us on a flight at 8:45 p.m. that very night. The other couple had been planning some sort of complicated route via Austin. Nevertheless, we all ended up on the same flight again and in adjacent rows on the plane, as had been the routine through the entire trip. Got our bag onto the same flight, too and we got back home around midnight.
At least we didn’t have much laundry to do after our trip.
