Travelling Disaster

Well, it wasn't a plane crash in this case but getting back to Iowa, which I'm thrilled to do, is turning into a nightmare. I'm sitting in the Sioux Falls airport waiting for my flight to leave currently, but it's been a poor day at best. I'm travelling with one other Martin Group employee, however, our two stories here will be very different.

Let me backtrack to last night. On the trip back from Minnesota, I ended up in Watertown with a flat tire. After half an hour, donut tire installed and I'm back up and running again. However, this tire requires travelling at lower speeds, and results on a very very late arrival back in Mitchell. Unfortunately, that bad karma carried into today. Upon arriving to the airport with my co-worker, we found that our flight had been cancelled. He did more checking, and found himself rebook on the next flight, which was the best ideal scenario. I, however, was not so lucky. I'd been pushed back to the 5am flight tomorrow. Haha!! No! So, I spent 20 minutes in line to talk to the agent. At least she was quite friendly. I'd have gotten snippy if she'd have been in a bad mood. She did some checking, and found that there is no flight that I could get to. I could get to Minneapolis, but then all the flights to Eastern Iowa were full. So, I asked to check other airlines, knowing that United and American both fly into Eastern Iowa also. She did some checking, and my itinerary was looking like a flight at 6:15 to Minneapolis, then to Chicago, and a late flight back into Iowa. However, I couldn't make the connections or the flights I needed were booked on all the other airlines. Wow. This was not happening!! Then, the agent volunteered to go talk to United. She went and came back stating they found me a ticket, so I could go with United. Upon arriving at the United counter, I found that I'd been placed on the 4:40 to Denver, then the 10:25 to Eastern Iowa. I'm going to get on a plane, that's going to take me 2 hours in the wrong direction, to get back on another plane 4.5 hours later that's going to cover all that ground again, and a little bit more. While it doesn't seem like a good option, I took it anyway, because I'd rather arrive a little after midnight, then get up at 3:30am to catch the flights to Iowa to work immediately upon arriving. At least this way a little sleep will be mine. I just hope my luggage arrives with me, or that could put the cap on a miserable travelling weekend.

PS. For my troubles, Delta has smoothed things over with me offering me a $300 travel voucher to be used in the next year. I come out on top in the end anyway!!