Day 1 - Who said Travel is good for the Soul?

Andrew picked me up just after 5.30am on Friday (11.30pm Thursday, New Orleans time) and we got to the airport without any problems. I was really excited to be finally on my way. No problems with check-in and my case only weighed 18.9kg (a miracle) and I even got through customs really quickly. The flight was only partially booked, there were plenty of free seats, so loads of space to stretch out and make myself at home. I was talking to a lady seated near me whose friend had been refused flight because she didn’t have one of the new types of passport and was hoping her friend would make a later flight.

The problems started on the flight, just little things but bad enough to niggle – broken headphones, wine that wouldn’t open and spilt tea etc. but worse was the fact that we were running late anyway and had a headwind. There was an hour turnaround between connections but you have to clear immigration, collect and re-check your baggage and then go through customs once again, before going to your onward destination. And that’s where the problems really started.

The aircraft should have arrived at 1.30pm, but it didn’t touch down until 2.03pm. The flight to New Orleans left at 2.40pm. When I get to immigration I am a bit stressed, not helped by the fact the queue has about 800 people in it, with more arriving all the time (Houston is Continental’s hub and ALL flights go via there) and to cap it all there are only 5 international lanes open. On the plane we have been told that there is a Continental rep waiting to help. I get her attention and explain to her about the short turnaround time to get to my flight, and at the same time a group of 4 people behind me start telling her that they need to get their flight to Las Vegas. She takes them away, telling me to wait; she’ll be back for me in a minute. The foursome are fast tracked through immigration, but she doesn’t come back to me immediately, in fact if I and the people next to me (also trying to get connecting flights) didn’t make enough of a noise she wouldn’t have come back over. When I ask her why she didn’t take me through too, she tells me that I’ll miss my flight anyway now so I may as well just queue up with everyone else. She tells me I will be rescheduled onto the next flight – the excuse for taking them, not me? There were 4 of them and it would have been worse if they’d missed their flights! How would it be worse? All around me people are being fast tracked for other flights which hold up my entry even more. I finally clear immigration at 3.15pm and get down to baggage collection.

Here I find my case has been broken (the carrying handle is out and stuck) and the lock on my case has been broken open. On top of my case is a new ticket – the flight time is for 9.45am on Saturday! This really isn’t good enough. I go to the help desk and she directs me to the service desk where I am told that there are no earlier flights available (this turns out to be a lie). He puts me on standby and checks my luggage – I have no choice but to send it on broken and don’t even get an apology, just a shrug and a comment that these things happen sometimes. Wouldn’t mind but this is a brand new case that I’ve never used before.

So next it’s off to customs. Of course there’s a huge queue and I’m a bit worried about not making the 3.45pm flight, but it goes relatively quickly, although nowhere near as fast as Gatwick as the US allows 3oz bottles in clear bags on internal flights and these all have to be checked. While in the queue I realise I have an open bottle of water so finish that and get rid of the empty bottle before getting to the scanner. At last I’m going through the detector – yep you guessed it, the alarm went off (which of course it didn’t at Gatwick). So I remove my earrings, necklace, bracelet and watch after assuring them I have no belt and go through again. Still I’m beeping. So I get moved to the search area. This is in full view of everyone in the airport, so I get lots of people looking at me like I’m some sort of criminal as I continue to beep when she runs the detector over me from head to toe. Doesn’t take a brain surgeon to work out it’s my underwired bra causing the problem, as it beeps under both arms and around both boobs. More worryingly it beeps when she runs it over the bottom of my feet – I am only wearing those flight sock things, and I’m sure they don’t contain metal. Luckily on the second sweep it stays silent so I don’t get dragged away for questioning and can finally go and try to get a plane.

So finally I go to the gate to await the next flight (of course it’s as far away from customs as you can get), just having time to grab a cup of tea on the way. Unfortunately there are lots of standbys. I am hopeful of getting on though, but will definitely be late to check in. The hotel instructions say they need to be told if you won’t be there for check-in at 4pm. For some reason I can’t seem to phone anywhere in the US so after a few frantic text messages, Dolly kindly phones the hotel for me to tell them that I’ll be late – not a problem they are open 24 hours a day. Unfortunately there is no luck on getting the 4.45pm flight so it’s off to the other side of the terminal building for the 5.45pm flight (and when I say other side I mean a train ride away). No luck with that either and so I’m back and forth across the terminal for the 6.45pm and 7.45pm.

By this time there is quite a crowd of us and we’re hanging around together – the ‘standby posse’ as we’re calling ourselves. Dolly has also phoned Herbsaint and cancelled my 9pm reservation as there’s no way I’m going to make it. At this point I find that I am still 11th on the list. How can this be possible when I’ve been there longer than anyone else? There are even people higher in the list than me who have confirmed tickets for later that day and are trying standby in hopes of an earlier flight! How? At this point Cindy (the gambler) tells me that she has just managed to get a confirmed flight for the 10.45pm flight, as has Ricky. We go to the service desk to get me on the flight and find out why I wasn’t put on that flight originally. Surprise, surprise, there are no places left and no-one can explain why I wasn’t on there, just that they didn’t notice that flight earlier when they did the tickets as it was on a different page, they probably didn’t scroll down far enough. The service staff can’t believe I’m still there after all that time, but aren’t able to do anything about the standby list apparently. I’m also told that Continental don’t consider themselves responsible for holding up my flight and as I should be on my way to New Orleans by now they won’t pay for me to stay in a hotel overnight if I need it. However, if I am still at the airport after all the flights for the day have gone, I can come back to the service desk and ask for a supervisor and argue with them about getting a hotel … what great service eh?

So it’s back to the gate to find that I and a couple of others in the standby posse have missed being called by about 30 seconds and others have taken our place. Having checked that we will still be at the top of the list for the next flight (at least I am finally in the top 3) we head off to the other end of the airport for the next plane, although at this point we stop at a bar en route for a few drinks (the first drink since the cup of tea I bought after clearing customs). We have almost an hour to kill anyway, as one of the flights has been cancelled (not helping the standby situation at all) and there’s no point in rushing as the standby list is sent over automatically. When we do get there we are horrified to find that the woman at the previous check-in desk has made a mistake – she deleted the list rather than sending it on and we all have to rejoin. There are a load more people waiting too and so we’re back at the bottom of the list. By this time I have been awake for 21 hours and my mood is grumpy to say the least and after a big argument with the counter staff and me explaining how long I’ve been waiting (yep, yet again they can’t believe I haven’t got a flight yet!) I am back to number 16 in the list.

It’s now that Ricky decides that he’s had enough and is really irked by my bad treatment (bless, he was so sweet). He lives in Houston and he and his work colleague are flying to New Orleans to get a seaplane out to the oilrig they work on in the Gulf. Ricardo has only managed a standby flight as well. Ricky offers to drive him, me and a couple of other people to New Orleans. He points out that during the time we have all sat there we could have driven there quicker. The other posse members are Dan who is from Baltimore and is staying with friends in the French Quarter, all of whom are already there (he missed a connection too) and Leslie who is from Bakersfield who is meeting her friend in New Orleans and is going to Voodoofest. They like me have VIP tickets. (her friend had to make 5 different connections with the flight she took (not with Continental) and she still arrived in New Orleans by 9pm!) We gratefully accept, even though it’s a 5 ½ hour drive and leave the other members of the posse to try and get the last flight.

So the next thing is to get our luggage back. Customer services tell us that they will be downstairs as since 9/11 no luggage goes anywhere without its owner. Downstairs in the baggage office they tell us that they aren’t at Houston, they’re already at New Orleans. We ask them to check and suddenly they’re not sure, then finally confirm that yes all our cases are in New Orleans. We get to the car park, where Ricky’s monster truck is and off we go (Ricardo decides he’s going to drive his own car), stopping en route at about 1am for MacDonald’s and petrol (the first food since lunch on the plane at what works out as 4.30am the previous day). We finally get to New Orleans airport at 5.30am (I’ve now been awake for 30 ½ hours) and finally manage to find someone in the almost deserted airport who can track down our cases for us. We say goodbye to Ricky – he has to get the seaplane at 7am and needs a rest after all that driving. Dan, Leslie and I get a taxi to the hotels.

I figure I can finally start to relax as I’m almost there, but no. We get the old, blind, stupid taxi driver. He gets us to Leslie’s hotel OK as she’s in the Marriott on Canal Street (and he knows that one), and then he heads into the French Quarter to find Dan’s Ramada Hotel. It takes quite a while as he obviously hasn’t got a clue where he’s going so we go up and down every street in the Quarter. Finally, he drops Dan off round the corner from his hotel because he says he can’t get to it. That leaves just me. Even though we had told him where we wanted to go when we got in the cab (and we had to go past the district that my hotel is in on the way to the others, he insisted on going this route, but he’s now complaining that he should have dropped me first as he now needs to go out of his way to take me. Using a map from his cab I explain that I am looking for South Peter Street, which runs off North Peter Street behind the back of Harrah’s casino. He insists that it’s in the French Quarter and so back we go, round and round, eventually ending up at St. Peter’s Street which he assures me is the correct place. I point out to him that there is no hotel but he’s telling me I’ve given him the wrong address! I try to show him on the map where I need to go but he tells me he can’t see the map – he’s been to the hospital that day to get his eyes sorted ‘cos he has cataracts or something. This is borne out by the fact that he’s jumping red lights, or just stopping in the middle of junctions when there is traffic coming the other way. I was pretty scared about being hit by another car and to top it all he is swearing and threatening to chuck me out of the taxi ‘cos he’s fed up of me telling him he’s in the wrong place. By this time everything had really caught up with me so I was in tears, which made him even worse. He started shouting at me telling me that he should never have taken the fare and that he’d had enough and I could get out of his taxi as he’d brought me to where I wanted to go.

Eventually I managed to get him to drop me at Harrah’s rather than in the French Quarter, and find the road myself (it is actually the road that he dropped me on), although no-one can tell me where the hotel is. I keep walking down a deserted road and finally find the hotel. The door is solidly locked and there is no-one at the reception desk to help me and let me in. This really is the final straw. I sit on the floor sobbing and banging on the door begging to be let in (yep pathetic I know but I was so tired and fed up by this point I was wishing I’d never bothered coming). Eventually this guy appears, tired and bewildered at why I am crying and checks me into the hotel. I finally get to bed at 7am (some 32 ½ hours after I got up to go on holiday) and set the alarm for 11.30am as I desperately need some sleep, but don’t want to miss too much of Voodoofest which starts at 9am, although the bands I really want to see don’t start until later in the day anyway.

Duran Duran performing 'Ordinary World'

Red Hot Chili Peppers performing 'Snow (Hey Oh)'