Perhaps there is a Viktor Navorski out there, but the name is in reference to the character that Tom hanks played in the movie The Terminal.

Businessman/passenger in bathroom: [Viktor is shaving in the bathroom] Ever feel like you’re living in an airport?

Wednesday was the last day of our workshop. The class ended at 4pm and our flight was to leave at 7pm. The current Terrorist level is Orange, so we figured that arriving around 5:30 would be about right, and that gave us a whole hour and a half to do something.

The workshop was at the Hilton and we stayed at Holiday Inn. As a result, we had all of our baggage with us and to avoid rolling it everywhere, we checked it in at the Conceirge’s station and head across the street for sushi! Dinner was good… we weren’t full but we weren’t stuffed either, very content.

We headed back to the Hilton to take their airport shuttle and arrive at the airport around 5:20. I looked at the screen and our flight was delayed from 7:00pm to 7:20pm, so I wasn’t worried… until I saw the line to check in.

2 lines of weather were coming into the area. A small band had already delayed some flights in the area. The second line had a little bit more substance to it and was headed right for us.

As we got to the back of the line, we quickly realized that some of the flights had already been cancelled as a not so nice representative of our airline proceed to walk down the line with 2 phone numbers… the reservation number for the airline and a reservation number for local hotels.

Oh great! Just great! Our flight is delayed, maybe canceled… all the hotels are booking up fast. What to do? Get out of line.

I broke out of line after about 5 minutes and walked over to another check-in area. Our flight was on the board, so until it said canceled, we weren’t canceled. We were over at the self check-in section and was able to get our luggage checked and boarding passes.

Now, we didn’t do a whole lot in the airport. Read, looked at the monitor, read some more… look at the monitor. I called to check on our connecting flight… it was on time.

The weather moved in, stalled over the exact coordinates and took a big dump of rain and lightening right overhead! The airport was closed for about 2.5 hours… nothing coming in, nothing going out and our connecting flight was still on time.

Our departure time kept drifting later and later:
7:20pm, 7:40pm, 8:20pm, 8:40pm, 9:10pm

It was now that the math didn’t work out. Airplane A leaving and heading SSE takes 1 hr to arrive at it’s destination. Airplane B leaves at 10:00pm heading NNE. If Airplane A leaves at 9:10pm what is the probability that Air Traveler Q will reach their destination? Doing the math, we see that as the limit of time(t) as it approaches infinity approaches 0.

Departure time: 9:40pm, 10:20pm (and it’s still 8:15pm!)

So after the mob of angry air travelers calmed down, I went over to a gate agent and had them book us for the flight the next morning. 7:39am. This meant one of two things… get a hotel at our interim destination and pray that we don’t over sleep or two, hang out in the airport.

Our flight came in well after midnight and the airport itself was closing down. I was able to get our new boarding passes and we wondered around for a while until we found our gate for the morning. Well, except that at 1am, security comes through and makes you leave.

So we wandered into the main section of the terminal where we found other stranded passengers hanging out in a business meeting area. We plugged in the mobile phone and tried to relax as we still had a couple hours to go. Well, except that at 2am, security REALLY wants you to leave the secured area. So we have to go out to the ticketing area.

Even though it was June, the AC in the airport was really overpowering. We ended up getting a decaf coffee just to try to warm up some. I had “acquired” a blanket and pillow from our previous plane, but it was still really cold.

We really didn’t sleep much on the floor of the airport and at about 5:30am, we heard that the secure area was going to open up… at the other end of the airport *sigh*

Everything else was fine, we got on our plane, made it home… had breakfast and despite being pretty tired, we were still excited about everything. Of course, we had caught up on our sleep but now were back were we started. Oh well.