« Shipwreck | Main | Way too much Dulles. »

Suddenly, I'm cold.

My years of good travel luck have finally caught up with me. We are stuck halfway between Aruba and home, in a business suite hotel in suburban Virginia. It is snowing outside and I am wearing capri pants and a t-shirt. The warmest thing I have is a lightweight hoodie. Our luggage is somewhere in the bowels of the Dulles baggage-handling machine.

After landing, our airplane sat on the tarmac for two hours waiting for our gate to become available. During this time we learned that our connecting flight had been canceled -- in fact, pretty much every outbound flight had been nixed. And that all the airport hotels were sold out. All cars rented. And the soonest we can get back to San Francisco is Sunday. That's in two days.

The airport was like a disaster area. Luggage that had been checked into and then removed from canceled flights was piled up all over the claim area. Displaced passengers slept on floors. And the taxi line snaked through the ground transit part of the terminal as a dispatcher grouped parties with similar destinations into shared cabs. (We later learned that sharing a cab in DC does not mean sharing a fare -- every party in a shared cab pays full fare. It's extortion.)

We finally found a hotel room; it is close to nothing but other hotels. No restaurants (except for a eyeball-burningly smoky Holiday Inn nightclub/sports bar which our wimpy California lungs couldn't tolerate for two seconds). Even the gas station mini-mart is closed. We are eating Kraft Easy Mac for dinner. It was that or Chef Boyardee.

It's not the best way to end a Caribbean vacation, but I'm trying to convince myself that it could be much worse. Tomorrow I'll probably have plenty of time to write an Aruba wrap-up and post a bunch more photos.

March 16, 2007 9:50 PM