So this past weekend was my sisters wedding up on Long Island in New York.
The original plan had been:
Work on Friday.
Drive to, leave our car at, and fly out of the Charlotte Airport Friday night.
Rent a car in NYC and drive to the hotel we were staying at for the wedding.
Attend the wedding Saturday.
Check out, return the rental car, and fly back to Charlotte Sunday night.
Note I say ORIGINAL plan because things didn’t quite work out the way we planned.
The trip up was fine, no problems at the airport or getting into NYC and driving to the hotel. We had to change our room around midnight because the AC was making a really high pitched buzzing noise and after first telling us there were no other rooms, and sending someone up to look at it they did finally find a empty room for us.
Saturday we went out to breakfast with my dad and brother while my mom and the other girls went to get their hair done. (the hotel charges for breakfast…along with wifi and local calls which is pretty lousy given what we were paying a night there). Saturday afternoon we all headed over to Brett (the groom)’s parents house where we took pictures and generally got stuff together for the wedding.
The wedding is self was really nice. They had it at a country club that’s like behind his parents house. There was a short ceremony outside and then dinner and reception after inside, complete with open bar! The food and drinks were really good and everyone seemed to have a fun time.
The issues really started after the wedding when we got back to the hotel. Sunday morning it was raining pretty good which pretty much just seemed to utterly destroy most everything at the hotel. That morning there was a short power loss of about 30 seconds (while I was trying to shower), then later there was no hot water, and the cable tv got knocked out. The biggest problem though were with the 2 elevators they hotel had (for 8 floors worth of guests) they had been flaky/breaking down earlier in the weekend I guess but the weather combined with so many people checking out at once meant we spent 15 minutes waiting for one to take us from the 3rd floor down to the lobby. We finally gave up and figured we would take the stairs but for whatever reason they don’t go to the lobby, instead they just lead outside. We braved the rain with luggage and were able to check out (and got a discount after complaining). Had a late breakfast/brunch with my family and headed to the airport.
Our flight wasn’t scheduled to leave till 4:30 so while we figured we would be there early we didn’t have enough time to do much of anything else after checking out and figured we would just kill time using the free WIFI Jet Blue provides and reading and what not. Well…after getting to JFK and returning our rental we get to the terminal to see our flight was canceled. So we wait in line for a good 30 minutes or so and talk to the customer service woman about what we can do. Seems while they did have other flights to Charlotte that were leaving that day they were all full and the earliest flight they could put us on was at 930pm on Tuesday (mind you this is at about 2pm on Sunday). Well besides the fact that they don’t provide any hotel or other compensation for weather issues we had left the cat home alone with 2 days worth of food, and while he would of survived, he wouldn’t of been happy having to go two more days alone, plus I really didn’t want to miss 2 days of work given I really don’t have any time saved up as of yet.
So we got a refund on our tickets, checked other airlines but no one else had any flights open till later in the week, likely due to the same problems with the weather. At that point we really didn’t have any other good options so I reserved a rental car on line and we headed BACK to the rental car section on the airport and proceeded to pick up our car and begin the 10 hour or so drive from NYC to Charlotte.
Luckily Meg and I were able to take turns driving and MANY hours and miles later we made it to the Charlotte Airport around 430am on Monday. We dropped off the rental, picked up our car out of the long term parking, and headed back to our apartment, finally getting in just a little after 5am. We were exhausted and after feeding the cat and leaving a message for work that I wasn’t going to make it in that day we passed out and slept from like 530 to around 1130 in the morning.
Random update »« The weekend