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no planes to New York
Sunday, July 19 2026
location: room 324, TownePlace Suites by Marriott, Boston, Massachussetts, USA
I was up at around 3:30am because I'd had so much sleep I was working with a sleep surplus. There was also the matter of still being on Malta time. I made myself coffee from Keurig pods (which I packed in my bag after using so I could dump the grounds into our garden instead of having them put in a landfill) and noodled around with my computer, visiting all my favorite sites on the information superhighway.
After Gretchen woke up, it wasn't long until we were thoroughly packed and ready to catch the shuttle for the airport. It turns out the shuttles are crowded in the early morning, and, though we were up in time for the 4:20am shuttle, we had to wait for the 4:45am shuttle we'd scheduled last night.
Once back in Logan Airport, we presented the cards that had been printed out for us regarding this morning's flight, but the person scanning such cards said it was not a boarding pass. So then we tried to use a machine to print out a boarding pass only to discover, to our horror, that our morning flight to JFK had also been canceled. It was starting to feel as if society was collapsing. Still, there had to be other flights that hadn't been canceled, and so we got into a line to try to get put on one of them.
After standing in the line for awhile, it was clear there was something very wrong with it. The person being attended to by the ticketing agent had been standing there for twenty minutes and nothing had happened. The ticketing agent kept being on the phone, and at one point she had two separate phones held up to both of her ears. By this point we were chatting with the couple in line in front of us, and they were as perplexed as we were.
As we waited in this seemingly hopeless line, Gretchen was also in the Delta app on her phone trying to get a supposedly live ticketing agent to put us on a flight that way. And though that agent kept saying not to worry, they weren't actually getting back to us to say we'd been put on a flight. After yet more dawdling, she made the claim that because our original flight had been ticketed through KLM (Royal Dutch) Airlines, she, as a Delta ticketing agent, couldn't help us. We would have to take it up with KLM! This was absurd on its face; Delta had vouched for our hotel last night and put us on the flight that had been canceled this morning. How could they suddenly wash their hands of something because of how the original ticket was bought, especially now? As absurd as this sounded, according to the couple ahead of us in line, that was a pretty standard reaction. They knew because it turned out that they were travel agents.
So now Gretchen had the KLM app installed and was trying to get someone from Royal Dutch Airlines to put us on a plane. But they were dawdling even more than the Delta agent had dawdled, and at some point told us that we should try to find a KLM agent in our airport. Mind you, while all of this was happening, the physical line we were standing in did not move at all.
So we got out of line and went all the way across Logan to the international terminal where KLM works out of. But when we asked about KLM at that terminal, the staffer we talked to had no idea that KLM is the name of an airline. It turned out that KML does occasionally work from that terminal, but they're only there around the times that a KLM plane is boarding, and that wouldn't be happening until sometime this afternoon. By this point, Gretchen and I were freely throwing around the word "kafkaesque," since it seemed we were trapped in the customer-experience void between various entities that were trying to shift the responsibility onto others. At some point Gretchen turned to me with a look of resignation and said, "This is too much; I can't! I just can't!" But then somehow we found a Delta line in the international terminal that seemed to be more functional than the one in the terminal we'd just been in. But, to maximize our chances of rapid satisfaction, she marched directly up to the premium ticketing line while I waited in the much longer, slower non-premium ticketing line, the one our tier of relationship to Delta dictated. To my surprise, Gretchen was able to lay out the full scope of our problem to the premium ticketing agent, adding in a lie about children who needed to be cared for. With utmost professionalism tinged with an appropriate amount of humor, the ticketing agent got to work finding us a solution. Unfortunately, though, there just were no flights. Flooding at JFK had backed up flights to it for many hours. It was looking to us like it might be better to rent a car, assuming, that is, that there were any available. Gretchen told the premium ticketing agent that we would look into renting a car and that if we went that route, we would tell her to give up on finding us a flight.
It didn't take much work with the Priceline app to reserve some sort of mid-sized Hyundai available at one of the rental car companies at Logan. So we went back to the helpful premium ticketing agent and told her we had things handled. After hitting a Hudson News to blow all of our food voucher money on nuts and such (it didn't go far), we caught the shuttle to the car rental place.
There was a line to be waited in there as well, but at least it was moving, and before long we were in a dark grey Hyundai of a fairly recent vintage. Since Gretchen hadn't brought her driver's license on this trip, all of the paperwork had to be done through me and I had to drive the car out of the rental car place. But that all went very quickly, and soon we were on the road driving out of Boston.
We were impressed with the up-to-date nature of the entertainment system and how well it meshed with Gretchen's Android phone. For example, the navigation map on the phone was also displayed on the car's LCD screen, with well-labeled notification overlays as texts and other messages came in. One could press the display to have an AI read the messages, which worked pretty well, although the LCD display did not have great touch sensitivity.
I hadn't eaten dinner last night, so I was quite hungry. For most of our drive through eastern Massachusetts, I kept eating nuts, jerky, and Chex-Mix, and at some point Gretchen got upset, claiming I was eating too much. She'd been subconsciously counting the calories, and it almost seemed from her reaction that she was worried I was going to make myself fat.
Gretchen took over driving at a rest area somewhere in Connecticut.
The drive took something like four hours, with the last part taking much longer than expected. As we neared JFK airport, Gretchen kept trying to call the company we'd parked our Chevy Bolt with and kept not getting through. She was hoping somehow that they would send a shuttle to pick us up at an obscure off-brand parking provider, a hope that seemed delusional to me, but it would've saved us a small amount of time. What ended up happening was that, when she finally got through, she asked if they would pick us up at a car parking place whose name she probably couldn't remember, and of course they said no. And when she asked where they could pick us up, I just blurted out "Terminal 4," since it didn't really matter; we'd have to get there by rental-car shuttle anyway. They then said they'd pick us up in five minutes and hung up. There was no way we could get there in five minutes, but lord knows we tried, having a frantic and horrible time for the entire sprint. Gretchen was lashing out at me just as I expected her to, since it's impossible to get through such an experience without lashing out at everyone you come in contact with. Things would've been vastly less stressful if Gretchen had just understood that, upon dropping off the rental car, we'd take a shuttle to a terminal and then wait to be picked up by our parking company's shuttle.
Fortunately, the rental car dropoff had gone extremely quickly, but the running between terminals had chewed through a lot of time and psychic energy. We ended up outside Terminal 4 waiting for something like a half hour for another attempt by our parking company to pick us up. On top of everything else, they'd somehow gotten the numbers wrong on our ticket and pulled the wrong car out of deep storage. But by the time we got to the parking lot, our car had been found. One last moment of fury came when Gretchen saw we'd been charged a late fee for picking up our car, something we obviously couldn't avoid.
Since I don't have the nerves to drive in this part of Queens, Gretchen drove us out of the city even as she had to jump on a group call related to the march to end animal testing. She was able to multitask those two things very well; all I did was make sure Google Maps had us going in the right direction.
We stopped to recharge our Bolt for about 25 minutes at a rest area a few miles south of the Tappan Zee Bridge on I-87. While there, Gretchen's group call ended and I bought a Monster energy drink, since that's a fun and trashy way to experience a road trip. I also drove us the rest of the way home. Gretchen managed to have yet another call related to the march closer to home, and while that was happening, I was worried about a crash on I-87 northbound somewhat north of the Newburgh exit that had been creating a 42 minute delay. But by the time we got there, the crash (which had produced a burning vehicle) had been removed and all I saw was a blackened rectangle on the shoulder.
Back home in Hurley, Gretchen lay down on the floor with the dogs, happy to be back with them again.
Later in the day, Gretchen managed to get $400 worth of airline vouchers for the inconvenience we'd been put through, which would cover the expense of driving a rental car. During the height of today's Kafkaesque madness, I'd told Gretchen that if I had known we'd be going through all that, I wouldn't've wanted to go on this vacation. But already the amnesia of how unpleasant it had been was causing me to think of it more as a fun story than as a horrible experience.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?260719 feedback
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