Flying to LA at 29 miles per hour

a trip diary

There’s some ironic symmetry to posting about my trip to LA on the day I leave. But it’s taken me three weeks to get over the trauma of my journey out here.

I’ll take a quick moment to say it’s been a really nice trip, with lovely, albeit a bit June-gloomy weather, very nice company, and a few wonderful beach walks. I’ll tell you a little about my time in SoCal in the next post.

Right now, here’s a story about my trip to LA.

I left the house about 6:00am on a Tuesday. (You know this is going to be a good story when I have to tell you what day I left, possibly to differentiate it from the day I actually arrived?)

Marcus drove us about a quarter of the way to the airport, when I got a text that my first flight, to Dallas, had been delayed—bad weather in Texas. We went back home and started out again an hour later. My flight was delayed again, but I just waited around the airport. I noticed that another airline had canceled some Texas-bound flights, but my airline, in a fit of either misguided wisdom or capitalistic greed, did not cancel any flights.

After finally getting underway, we circled Dallas until the pilot came on the intercom and told us that we only had about 30 more minutes of “circling fuel”—or something like that—left. As you might imagine, this created a tiny bit of angst. Do they have to tell us this information? If not, I would have preferred they’d have kept it to themselves, to be completely honest. Anyway, we began our descent.

It was the worst landing I’ve ever experienced in my life.

Not only did we get to enjoy the usual vertical turbulence, but this flight had the extra bonus of a copious amount of horizontal turbulence. You didn’t know which way you were going to get whiplash from—the possibilities were endless!

The family in the row in front of me and across the aisle had a small baby. At one point, the mom handed the baby over to the dad, so he could basically hold her like a football. The baby kept looking at me over her father’s shoulder, and I have to tell you, this kid and I are bonded for life now. I will probably be at her college graduation. She was so calm! And as a result she helped me relax too, because I sort of thought I was going to die. I took a stealth photo of that baby, she was so cute. I wish I could post it here, but of course I won’t do that for privacy’s sake. Let me tell you though, she was so darn mesmerizing. An old soul.

When we made it to the ground, we had to wait for a gate to open up before deplaning. The entire airplane kept shifting and shaking, as if we were still in the air. Later I found out that t hat storm produced 80-mile-an-hour winds. Not a lot of planes were landing, except maybe for the ones that were out of “circling fuel.”

Lesson learned—don’t fly through Texas in spring storm season.

The airport was a nightmare, people EVERYWHERE, and the only place I could find to sit down was on the floor next to a sign stanchion. It was not optimal for my nervous system. I kept thinking, well, this really doesn’t feel good at all, but I have no choice, so I just need to take deep breaths and ride it out. So I ate part of a sandwich and kept an eye on the departure time of my next flight, which kept shifting later and later

Until it got canceled.

I got a text telling me to stand by, I would get automatically rebooked!

I went from overloaded to anxious. I called Marcus—bless him for putting up with all my calls informing him that I was one breath away from losing it—and he helped me try to figure out what to do next. I remembered I have several friends in the DFW area, one of whom I’ve stayed with a few times when I went down for a couple Abraham Hicks seminars. I called her, told her where I was and what was happening, and before I could ask, she said sure, come over, but get your suitcase first. Whew! A place to stay, only an Uber ride away…

I bought a crappy emergency salad (I have food issues, if I don’t have some with me I FREAK OUT), and went down to the baggage claim to get my bag. About 200 – 300 other people had the same idea. After waiting in line for an hour, I was told I’d get my bag back in about three hours. Now I was heading out of Anxiousville on an express train to Losing-My-Shit Town.

This same airline imploded last Christmas, thanks to bad winter weather. You might have heard about it on the news. Someone else in line said that when the airline canceled all their flights over Xmas, they put everyone’s bag out in the baggage claim area and a lot of stuff got stolen. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it makes sense as to why this time when the airline was imploding, they didn’t put anyone’s bags out. They took down my bag tag information and told me “someone would go in the back and look for it and bring it out.”

I’m not sure how anyone could think that system would work well for 300 people waiting around for their bags? (If you have a logical explanation, please let me know because this will forever be one of the stupidest things I have ever seen in my life unless you tell me otherwise.)

Who thinks this is an okay solution?

So I waited, parked on the floor in front of one of maybe four electrical outlets in the whole place so I could charge my phone. During this lovely time, I got a text with my new updated flight info. I’d been rebooked! For two days later.

What the actual eff. Who thinks this is okay?

I considered chucking the whole trip and jumping in a rental car so I could go home and watch TV on the couch. But Marcus said that was dumb. What does he know, I say!

I was headed straight out of Losing-My-Shit Town and careening at unfathomable speeds into I’m-About-To-Stop-Functioning-Altogether Gulch.

Imagine two long lines of people (and no one really knew which line was the “right one” to be in), and people sitting on every available bench or surface, and people sitting on the floor, and everyone is hoping their bag is next…

I really thought this was it. No crappy emergency salad in the world was going to fix this situation.

Everybody has a tipping point at which they can’t take any more. Thanks to my overly sensitive nervous system, my tipping point comes a lot sooner than many other peoples’. Several times, I really did feel like I was about to shut down. It’s hard to explain. It was sort of like a panic attack, but also like this feeling I was about to dissolve into nothingness. Like I didn’t have enough energy left to keep being. It’s something I would prefer not experiencing too many more times in my life, until that time when I actually do stop being. Then it will be okay.

This airline lets you track your bag on their app. As far as I could tell, my suitcase had been unloaded from the plane after we landed. I just had to wait for it to show up by magic. After two hours of waiting, on a whim I checked my bag’s status.

Lo and behold, it had gotten loaded on to an airplane.

To Houston.

Who thinks THIS is okay? Who thinks it’s okay to make someone wait two days before getting them where they need to go, and also thinks it’s a stroke of genius to send their bag on ahead of them?

I really want to know.

Yes, I went to talk to an unsympathetic employee. Yes, I tried tell them this wasn’t acceptable. But it wasn’t their fault. In situations like this, almost everyone is totally absolutely powerless. So I gave up.

I walked seven miles to Dallas Love Field’s Totally Creepy Rideshare Lot, got an Uber to Flower Mound, and my wonderful friend took me to Target to buy underwear and whatnot. Because of course I didn’t have any of that with me. I didn’t even bring my laptop power cord in my backpack—something I ALWAYS do … except for this trip.

I spent the next day working on a borrowed laptop in pj shorts. At one point the airline sent me a survey. “How was your trip to Dallas? We’d like to know!”

I let them know.

I felt as if I’d been hit by a bus—the chemical aftereffects of spending so much time in a state of complete overwhelm. I watched my suitcase’s progress from Houston to Vegas to LA. Thursday morning, I got up at 3:00am and two flights later finally completed my journey. Two very unsympathetic LA-based airline employees grudgingly took me to my beloved suitcase.

I think I am okay now, just in time to fly home. But that is all going to be okay, because I’m flying through Phoenix and there are no storms there. Also, it is all going to be okay because it has to be okay.

I’ll keep you posted…

ya’ll can kiss my grits. (photo credit: Brijesh Reddy on Unsplash)

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