As storms, staff shortages, and scheduling malfunctions swept the nation this winter break, many a Bwog staffer was delayed or stranded. Enjoy this compilation of their travel struggles!

Flight Frustrations

Moved my flight from December 23 to December 22 in anticipation of the BOMB CYCLONE. The whole experience was an escalating number of absurdities. Hellish final exam, immediately turning around and getting to LGA (which took over an hour), running into the only other kid from my high school who goes to an NYC school at the bag drop. My mother says I should buy him a drink. I tell her I’m not trying to cruise some guy I went to high school with. Also, he’s reading The Song of Achilles because the girl he likes loves it, so the vibes are not like that anyway. We board on time but spend an hour on the tarmac because the air traffic controllers are ghosting the pilot. We take off. Somewhere over Delaware, we have the worst turbulence I’ve flown through. People are screaming. We land safely but are stuck on the tarmac again because there’s no one on the ground to guide the plane to the gate. “It’s that kind of night, huh,” the pilot says—and, scene.

Sick in the City

Got COVID and never left.

Vexing Vermont, I

I got up at 5 am for my 9 am flight, only to arrive at JFK and find the plane was delayed by an hour. We get on the plane and it’s seemingly smooth sailing from there… only 45 minutes to Vermont from New York! Less than an hour later, we’re hovering over the very cloud-covered airport, circling around in the air twice before the pilot announces that there’s too much cloud cover and we’ll be making a U-turn more than 200 miles to an airport in Connecticut. At that point, we might have just flown back to NYC.

We then proceeded to remain seated in the plane in Connecticut for the next two hours while we waited for the cloud cover to lessen in Vermont… I had to call my cousin to let her know I was several hundred miles away in an empty airport, awaiting weather news, lunch, and solid ground. It was now almost 2:00 pm and every baby on the plane had an unchanged diaper and was vocalizing their pain for the rest of us onboard. After an oil refuel and giving everyone pretzels as compensation for a 1-hour-turned-6-hour-adventure, JetBlue took off once more and finally landed in Burlington.

New Mexican Irony

Spent six hours sitting under an advertisement for New Mexico waiting for my flight to New Mexico only to have Southwest cancel it after hours of delays because they couldn’t find a flight attendant.

Vexing Vermont, II

I took an eight-hour Amtrak back to NYC, immediately followed by a six-hour bus ride to Vermont. None of this was delayed or canceled, but it was still pretty awful.

An Arctic Trek

My whole city got coated in a quarter inch of ice. Nobody could leave their houses because we have hills. I was able to go to the grocery store only because I used my literal crampons to walk there on city streets.

Colorado Craziness

Winter Storm Elliott got my flight to Colorado canceled, so my family drove seven hours to another airport to catch another one. We left super early in the morning and got there right on time, after which our flight was delayed about five hours. We bonded. Like, a lot.

A Freezing Freeway Affair

Was trying to drive home after romping around in the mountains and surprise! The freeway was closed because of conditions (lots and lots of snow and semi-trucks spinning out and such). Was it signed in advance that this was the case? Absolutely not. Did the Department of Transportation alert me in any way of this? No, they did not. So, it ended up being a bunch of parked cars on the freeway while it was -10° F because nobody could go anywhere. It wasn’t a crazy long time until they reopened it, but it was long enough that people started to go pee in the snowbanks on the side of the highway.

Delayed via Flickr