Stranded in Style

2 Comments to “Stranded in Style”

1. 

   MichelleSeptember 14, 2011 at 12:17 pm

   “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain speaking – we’re having some mechanical difficulties…” The woman sitting next to me on the plane sighed deeply. We were waiting to pull away from the gate for our flight from Atlanta to Norfolk, VA. I was anxious to get home – I’d left San Salvador at noon and it was already 10:30pm. It’d been a long day and it was about to get longer.

   “I was stranded in Atlanta airport a few years ago,” the lady next to me recalled. Since I had nowhere to go and nothing else to do, I asked her to tell me the story.

   “It was winter and the city had been immobilized by a terrible ice storm. We were sitting on the runway for 3 hours waiting for our plane to be de-iced! Finally they cancelled the flight, and told us there probably wouldn’t be any flights the next day. It was 2am by this time, and people were sprawled out all over the airport, sleeping on chairs, on their luggage, on the floor. All the hotels in the area were full.

   “I decided I wasn’t going to spend the night in the airport, then wait all the next day for a flight that probably wouldn’t happen, then possibly spend ANOTHER night in the airport. So I rounded up 2 perfect strangers from my flight and asked if they wanted to drive to Virginia that night!

   “They agreed, and I think we got the last rental car available. We had to go about 5 or 10 miles an hour through the city of Atlanta because of all the snow and ice. We could hardly see the road. It was crazy! It was the middle of the night and I was driving in an ice storm with two strangers! But I was desperate to get home!

   “We drove all night and all the next day, and finally made it to Norfolk. I was exhausted, but so happy to finally be home. And by the end of all those hours and hours in the car together, the three of us knew EVERYTHING about each other! We were best friends by the end of the trip! It turned into one of the best decisions I ever made – much better than being frustrated and sleepless in the airport in Atlanta!”

   p.s. By the time my fellow passenger finished her story, the mechancial issues were resolved and our plane was taking off – I was thankful that THIS time we wouldn’t be stranded, but was encouraged by this woman’s story of making the best of a bad situation, and turning it into a great memory!

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2. 

   Daniel JeterSeptember 3, 2010 at 8:22 pm

   Well… it’s a little embarrassing, but I was stranded in Chile’s Santiago airport (aka: “SCL” for those travel savvy people out there) once for 21 hours. I was on my way to Mendoza, Argentina to visit a YWAM base where I lived for a while, and one of my connecting flights was in Santiago, Chile.
   My original layover was about 3 or 4 hours, so I decided to take a nap while I waited for my flight. Since I was there 4 hours early they didn’t have a gate assignment for my flight yet, so I tried to position myself in as central a location as possible. The time on my phone kept switching between two different time zones, so I set two alarms to make sure that I couldn’t possibly miss my flight.
   Neither of them went off, and I woke up to the sound of “last call for flight ___ to Mendoza, Argentina.” Still in a sleepy daze, I scrambled to find a monitor showing which gate I needed to go to. It just happened to be the farthest gate possible from where I was, so I started sprinting as fast as I could (skateboard in hand)to the gate. I arrived breathless only to see my plane backing away from the jetway. The next flight was not until the next day.
   On top of that, a friend of mine was coming to pick me up at the airport in Mendoza, and had gotten a local pastor to drive her 2 hours through the mountains only to find out that I wouldn’t arrive until the next day. Talk about good times! haha, so after I felt horrible for a while, i decided to make a little video…

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV-FrYDEEgM

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