I had travel plans to Hawaii for my sixtieth birthday last year. My husband and I hadn’t been there in over twenty years (with raising our children and helping with grandchildren). My oldest grandson drove us to the Sacramento Airport. We were there about three hours ahead of time—I didn’t know what to expect—I hadn’t flown much since 9/11.
Our bags were checked in and we sat and waited for our connecting flight to San Francisco. Soon there was an announcement that the flight we were waiting for had mechanical problems and it was canceled. Now we have no car parked at the airport to drive to San Francisco and you’d think the airlines would just move us over to another flight to get us there or put us on a different airlines flying to Hawaii out of Sacramento. No—they decide to call taxi cabs to shuttle us over to the bay. Everyone was scrambling to make there connecting flight. We got into the cab and got on our way. With Bay area traffic and a slow down for an accident, the cab made it there with only ten minutes to make our flight—which was NO WAY!
We now have missed our first day’s activities that I had planned and got put on a flight that didn’t leave until that night, getting us into Hawaii about 11:30 p.m. We were stuck in the airport for eight hours waiting for the next flight. We were finally in the boarding process, when my husband and I got RANDOMLY pulled out of line to have the THOROUGH check for homeland security!!! We are both Caucasian—I have blonde hair and blue eyes. We were put in a see-through booth which shot high pressured air in case we had explosives on our person. Our cell phones were swabbed over with GOD KNOWS WHAT. Our carry on had to completely unloaded to see what was in our bag. I thought well, this is the trip from HELL!!
When we arrived in Oahu, our original shuttle service that we had prepaid to get us to the hotel had know idea that we had missed the first flight so I had to call the company to get someone out to pick us up. We finally checked in about 12:30 a.m. So that is the end to my “Travel Horror Story.”
