My Two Year Blogging Anniversary: Stuck in McGhee Tyson Airport

Song Lyric of the Day:

I’m dressed in white noise / You know just what I want

Goldfrapp / “Strict Machine”

8:35AM.
I’ve been up since 3:50AM this morning. Why? To catch my 6:10AM flight to New York City. But it’s 8:36AM now, 26 minutes after my original scheduled landing time. I should be getting my luggage in LaGuardia Airport right about now, but instead I’m using the nearby Hilton’s free WiFi connection (thanks, Paris & Nicky!) to blog from Knoxville’s McGhee Tyson Airport. From gate 3, to be exact.

So what happened? Well, I woke up, showered, woke Nan up (she stayed over last night to drive me to the airport), and headed to the airport. I got to Gate 5 with plenty of time; 5AM, to be exact. As boarding time neared, a Delta representative informed us that our plane was experiencing mechanical difficulties, was being worked on, and that we’d be boarding a bit late. Okay. Fine. About a half hour after our scheduled takeoff time, we were updated that the problem was still being worked on. About 15 minutes after that update, we were told to switch to Gate 3 where we’d board another plane. Okay. Great. Don’t want to fly on a defective, potentially unsafe plane, right?

We boarded our replacement plane at about 7AM. I read a bit and then settled down for a nap while we waited to taxi down the runway. I had just fallen into a nice, comfortable sleep, when–despite my earplugs–I heard the flight attendant announce that this plane–the replacement plane–was experiencing mechanical difficulties and that we’d be taxiing not down the runway but back to the gate. Okay. Fantastic.

After sitting on the plane until almost 7:30AM, we were told that maintenance workers had filed paperwork and that once they got it back it would take about an hour to fix the plane. To fix the thingamabob needed for landing. We would be getting off the plane and going back to our gate. I and my fellow passengers scooped up our carry-on luggage and our complimentary sorry-you’re-missing-your-flight-to-New-York-City water bottles and blankets (an heirloom-quality creation I’ll someday pass on to my children. Or cats.) Okay. Wonderful.

Our options are to either wait for our plane to be fixed (fingers crossed!) or wait for flights to Atlanta leaving Knoxville at 11:30AM and arriving in New York City at 4PM. Pray for our plane to get fixed. I’d rather not lose a whole day of my vacation, and neither would my fellow passengers.

So now here I sit, on my two-year blogging anniversary, hoping that Mechanic Mike will pull through for us and get our plane fixed. After countless text messages to Rich from on and off the plane, I booted up my trusty MacBook to write a blog post in Word to be posted later. But, lo and behold, I got free WiFi instead. Now I just need to get to New York City.

Did I mention I’ve been up since 3:50fuckingAM?

10:00AM.
Guess where I am now? At 9AM, we finally got to reboard our plane. Everyone got settled in and our flight attendant was buckled into her own seat; everything was ready to go. Then our intrepid pilot came over the PA system. Turns out LaGuardia Airport is not taking any inbound flights right now due to some storms that moved into the area. So even though we were finally ready to go and cleared for flight, we now can’t go anywhere. They think we’ll be sitting here on the tarmac for at least an hour, until LaGuardia has all the earlier diverted traffic under control.

Disclaimer: If I have to update again about anymore unforeseen, not-so-funny-ha-ha delays here in Knoxille, it will be a posthumous post as I will have gone ahead and killed myself out of sheer frustration.

I think I’m going to nap until takeoff; at the rate I’ve been reading my book–which was supposed to last me the whole trip–I’ll be done with it before we get airborne. When I got to the airport this morning, I started reading at the beginning of Chapter 4. I’m now up to Chapter 20. Keep in mind that I’m reading Tess Gerritsen and not James Patterson, so the chapters are longer than two pages each. Shit, if I was reading a Patterson book, I’d have covered 83 chapters by now.

10:19AM.
I want to either be in the air or to get off this plane!!! I wonder which power that is I pissed off. Who knows?

In the interest of not climbing the walls, I’m going to do this fun movie trivia challenge again. See how well you do–the challenge is to figure out which movies are represented by the scenes created using office stationery. It’s harder than it sounds.

10:36AM.
Pattie’s ghost here. Pattie just killed herself with that handy-dandy elastic strap on the sample oxygen mask the flight attendant uses in her demonstration. She snapped over the latest and not-so-greatest update from the pilot: LaGuardia is still a mess, trying to sort out all the incoming traffic and dealing with really high winds. Apparently, East Coast airports are all a mess right now.

But don’t be sad for corporeal Pattie–be happy for her. She’s in a better place now. She got in one last, meaningful phone call with her loving husband, Rich. She even managed to squeeze in reading some infotainment news before she caught that on-time flight to the great airport in the sky.

Her ghost will probably update again later, though, since she, like the corporeal Pattie, is beyond bored sitting in this hot aluminum tube.