My Christmas Experience

I call it an experience because it really was an experience. So I get to LAX airport to fly home to Cleveland to be with my family for christmas. I get there and it's pandamonium. People are everywhere there's traffic out the a$$. I'm not sure I was even going to make my flight eventhough I was an Hour and 15 minutes early. I get to American and it was terribly busy as usual. Luckily I only had carry-ons so I didn't have to wait in the huge line. Here's a hint for everyone don't check baggage during the holidays. Either you'll miss your flight or they'll lose your luggage. Any ways I breeze through the lines and make it to my flight, which was on time to my surprise. I get on the plane and sleep till my lay over at Chicago O Hare Airport.

Here's where the experience comes into play. I look to see when my flight to Cleveland was leaving and I look down and see that the one flight that cancelled out of the hundreds I looked at was mine. How the hell did I get on the only flight cancelled. So now what do I do. I went to the lady at the desk and she said I was in luck she put me on a plane the next day (which was christmas eve) at 8PM. "LUCK" I said "How is that luck?" I asked calmly so what do I do till then? Are you guys going to set me up in a hotel? "Oh no sir, we don't do that anymore but I'd be willing to get a list of hotels you can stay in?" I thought I was going to lose my sh@t. Not only is my flight the next day but now they aren't going to give me a hotel and it was only 1PM. she also said I could wait stand by tomorrow for the morning flights.

After realizing I could do nothing with the flights I thought well maybe I could rent a car and drive the 5 hours to cleveland. I called every rental car place in the Chicago area and none of them had a single car to rent. At this point I'm thinking ba hum bug. Then I called U-Haul to see if I could rent one of those trucks I always see on the highway for 19.95. Yeah, that deal is a crock of sh@t because the cheapest they could give a truck to me was $350. So that was out of the question.

Finally I thought well maybe Greyhound is going to Cleveland (Oh yeah the reason my flight was cancelled was there was a huge snow storm). I called them and they said there was a bus that was leaving at 5PM for $50 but I had to be there an hour early. It was 3:15PM so I asked information what was the fastest way downtown the L or a taxi. The guy said a Taxi would take me 25 minutes. I was like perfect, finally a break.

I get into the taxi and we were off. Then the unthinkable happened, well maybe it isn't unthinkable, but after the day I was having this just added to it. I hit stopped traffic, I'm talking we were going 0 mph. The driver was really cool and knew of my delemah so he got off the freeway and tried the side streets. Guess what happened there. More f@cking traffic. The cab driver told me about Amtrak and maybe they have a better deal. So I called them and found out that they had a 5:30 train leaving for Cleveland for $73. I thought perfect, if I miss the bus I'll just take the train. The only problem was getting there on time. After an hour and thirty minutes I was finally there. I missed the bus so he took me directly to the train station. I took one look at the line and realized the only way of getting out of Chicago was waiting stand by the next day and hoping I'd get on a flight. So now I was downtown at Amtrak and to make matters worse my phone dies. What else could go wrong? So I went looking for a plug-in finally I found one in the arcade and called my friend Tom who lives in Chicago. He told me that I could stay at his house but there's one problem. He's in St. Louis with his family. I thought what the hell is going on can I get something to go my way today. Tom called his landlord and got him to go to his house to open the door. How great is that? So at least now I have somewhere to stay till the morning when I have to go back to O'Hare to hopefully get on a stand by flight.

I woke up at 4AM just to make sure I got to the airport early because there was no way I was taking a taxi and I knew the L took an hour to get to O'Hare. I got there at about 530Am and the first stand by flight I could get on was at 645AM. Now normally this is a ton of time to get on a plane. Not with my luck though because the line was huge but remember I had carry-ons so I went to the kiosks where I normally get my e tickets. The problem was this time it said see an agent. I went to the agent and she told me I had to stand in line. I looked at the line and it was about a mile long. So I figured there was no way I was getting on the 645Am flight. I laughed and went to the end of the line. By this time I didn't care anymore. I started watching the millions of people at the airport. Have you ever just sat back and watched people at the airport? I finally realized why they have a show called airport because it's entertaining how mean people can be. I really feel sorry for the ticket people. They got yelled just about every other customer. Some of the stories these people complained about were hilarious and very entertaining. While waiting in line a lady came over to me and asked if I had carry ons only and I said yes. She let me go right to the front skipping I'd say about an hour worth of waiting.

Finally I got on the first stand by flight. Ahh what a relief right...HAHA not with my luck because I wasn't the only one with the idea of getting on stand by that morning. I was number 68 on the stand by list. As soon as I heard that I realized this was going to be harder than I thought and I should've stayed at Tom's house and slept.

The next stand by flight I was number 35 than I went to 15 just to go back up to 32 on the next one. Now how does that happen? Let's see, as soon as everyone finds out that the flight is full everyone rushes to the counter to bump their name up. So I finally realized I was getting on the 8PM and went to Chili's with 10 other people who were stuck at O'Hare for Christmas EVe and we started drinking. I think we all had a nice buzz by the time we got onto our 8PM flight. Here's the part that pisses me off, the only flight that wasn't full and could hold stand bys was the flight I was booked on. Nice huh?

I finally made it home at 1130PM on Christmas Eve. Now Christmas Eve is The Mizanin Family get together day and they all waited up for me to go over my Aunt Mary's. Isn't that nice. We usually play some sort of board game till the wee hours in the morning. We're funny like that so we played Catch Phrase. It's a real fun game and I'd recommend it to everyone.

Christmas finally arrived and I went to my Uncle Jonny's and Aunt Patty's house. My uncle just had a heart attack and how does my family deal with it. Well my uncle asked me if I wanted to get in on the bet of what day this year he was going to die. His son had Christmas and took him on a jog this morning. So how does the Mizanin family deal with serious situations we make a joke out of it. That's what I love about them. The weekend ended up being great I got to see my mom and dad and the rest of the fam. Saw some friends and hung out. Finally I got home safely with no delays or cancellations. That's my christmas experience. I hope nobody had the Plane's, Train's, and Automobile's Christmas that I had. I was so waiting for Dale Griffith to come around but he never did. :)