What the hell am I doing in Cleveland?
Another tortuous day at the hands of commercial airlines.
I blame Delta.
Not because they screwed up, but because if their fares weren’t so insanely high out of Cincinnati (CVG) we would not have driven to Dayton to catch a Continental flight. Unfortunately, while our destination was Boston, our itinerary necessitated flying through Newark which was experiencing a bit of weather today. Some carriers were still flying into Newark, even from Dayton, but not our dear Continental.
The best they could do was offer us a flight tomorrow morning from Dayton connecting through Cleveland that would get us into Boston early morning. The kicker was that the connection time was only 25 minutes, and given our run of luck lately, we decided to instead rent a car, drive to Cleveland and just take the flight from Cleveland to Boston. I know the thinking seems convoluted, but we’re trying to make it to a new business pitch, and we really wanted to minimize the variables of what could go wrong.
That still seems odd I realize, but if you had been face to face with the Continental crew we encountered and watched them struggle to figure out how get us to Boston, you may have opted to drive a good portion of the way there as well. Particularly when their “guru” (who finally deciphered how to rebook us after 30 minutes) came out to give us our tickets smelling as if he was working on a fifth of whiskey.
To be fair, he was a very nice guy and I think he was off-duty when they went to find him, but I’m guessing he might have been able to help us a bit more expediently if he hadn’t had “Old Granddad” helping him along.
The irony in all of this is if we were flying direct to Boston from Cincinnati (a frequent route for Delta) we would not have had any weather related delays. But we were also looking at a $1400+ ticket out of Cincinnati versus a $400+ ticket out of Dayton (x 4).
We’re either going to win this new business pitch to pay off some karmic debt, or the whole venture has been cursed from the beginning and we should just drive home now.
For now, I’m optimistically going with the win scenario.
