When vacations go wrong...

My wife is the type of person that come hell or high water, she's going to get her way when she puts her mind to it. Sometimes this works out quite well for us, sometimes it doesn't seem like it was worth the trouble. By the way... this is going to be really, really long. I might hit the text limit and have to finish this in a reply post.

Months back a travel agent through our insurance company sold my wife on a "vacation package". For a little over $3000, we got a week long stay in a resort (one room, max occupancy 6), along with a week long cruise for two on our choice of a few different cruise lines. Well, we have two special needs kids, so I took one for the team and told her to find someone to take the cruise with, and I'd chill with the boys. She tried to take her sister, then one friend, finally settling on another friend from out of state that we've been thinking of hiring as a full time nanny. She books the resort week and the cruise week back to back, because it was the only time we could guarantee that not only could we both take leave, but the boys wouldn't be in school yet.

My wife felt guilty about taking the cruise without me there though, so after much pleading and accounting, it was decided me and the boys would be joining in on the cruise. We can't get another cruise package, so the new booking had to go straight through the cruise line (Royal Caribbean), and I had to go through the airline to book the same flight package my wife was booked on. Only took a couple hours, but most everything is set in place.

The itinerary (... at least how it was supposed to work out):
7Aug - last day of my on-call shift, and I was able to pull early shift to get me out of work at 4PM to have time to finish packing.
8Aug - The plan is to pick up friend at the airport, then drive to Richmond (3 hours) to drop off our dog with her sister, then another couple hours to Williamsburg to check in to our room.
15Aug - Last day in Williamsburg, check out, drive home, pick up dog on the way.
16Aug - Fly to Florida from DC, land around noon, catch ship before it sails 4PM.
23Aug - Leave ship, fly back to DC to return to regularly scheduled drudgery.

The first week went exactly as planned. We had an amazing room with it's own large jacuzzi tub, and it's own small sauna in our bathroom. The tub was so large that I could actually stretch out in it, and I'm 6' tall. We cooked some, ate out some. We spent one night bowling, another night shopping. Wednesday we decided to use our military free day to get into Busch Gardens, and that was fun (besides my 3 year old kicking his shoe off somewhere in the park, which was not recovered).

We realized at this point that if her sister in Richmond kept our dog, we'd have to make an extra trip after the cruise to pick him up, so we asked Robear and Kiri to keep him. They agreed (thankfully), which was one less thing to worry about. So after checking out, we drive 6 hours back home, get back late, I drop off the dog with food and a crate. We pull everything inside and re-pack for air travel.

Unbeknownst to us, the FAA had a little glitch on Saturday as we were driving back, which caused a few hundred flights to be cancelled. We got very little sleep that night, got up early on Sunday, got dressed, and hit the road. We gave ourselves plenty of time to catch our flight.

The first problem was a silly one... We booked to fly out of DCA, and thought that was Dulles. SO, when we arrive at Dulles to find our flight is actually out of Reagan, we all hop back in the car as fast as possible, and head there. We lost about an hour, but we still got to Reagan with two hours to spare.

We get there and lines are wrapping the outside of the building. My wife gets in the American Airlines line to check baggage and get our tickets, while I take my youngest son and go pack in the economy parking. It's a drive. I wait for a bus, hop on, and ride it back. Total time I've spent is around 45 minutes. When I get back, my wife is still in the same spot, trying desperately to get someone to get us through the line so we don't miss our flight. Eventually a very kind FAA rep pulls her out, and tells her to go over to the US Airways line so we don't miss our flight. We get over there, wait a few minutes more, then we're pulled to the self checkout.

Bags are checked, tickets are in hand, now we have to get through security. Security is so backed up that they have one long line for flights later in the day, and one slightly shorter line for flights leaving that morning. My wife and kids get through no problem, but I get selected for a pat down. My wife tells the flight attendant that we're trying to get through security (this now being around 8:15 with our flight at 8:30), and the TSA agent sees in the scan that we have baby powder. We tell them to just keep it, we can buy more, but they then have to check everything.

Ultimately, we get to the door at 8:25 to find they've already given our seats away and shut the door. Much freaking out ensues.

The next 6 hours are a blur for me. It involved basically carrying my 40lb 3 year old, two car seats, and three of our suitcases around the airport multiple times while my wife fought to get us on any plane at any price to Florida with enough time to get our luggage (that successfully made our flight), and get to the port. My wife talked to 17 different customer service reps between US Airways, American, and Jet Blue. Because of the glitch, everything was overbooked with long standby waits. Everything. Knowing that the flight would be about 2.5 hours, plus another hour or so to rent a car and drive to FLL to get our luggage, then another 30 to get to the port, I let my wife know that anything she found after noon would end up in us missing the ship. No way around it. So once noon passed, I accepted that our vacation was essentially over, or at least we would likely be doing something vastly different than planned. Not my wife though.

American basically scheduled an extra flight just to get some of the people off standby. It was set to leave at 2:15, and arrive around 5PM. We'd get there after the ship, but the one thing about a cruise is that it stops in multiple ports, so now if we can get passports, we can fly to the first port and catch the ship there. We verify this with the cruise line. We look into passports. All passport offices operate by appointment only. No appointment, you're not even getting through security. But there aren't many offices, and they're pretty spread out.

I call the Miami office, only to find that the earliest appointment they had was for 24Aug. Not going to do a lot of good. So I call the next closest office and get an appointment at 1030 on 17Aug... in Atlanta. We book the flight to Miami.

We sit on the runway for a little bit (maybe 25 minutes). I'm exhausted. My wife is exhausted. We're spread out, so that I'm one seat in front of her, and she's got both our boys. Her friend is about 8 rows forward of us. Our boys are both special needs. We have a 5 year old that suffered brain damage at birth, but the only thing most people notice with him is that he can be hyper as f*ck. Our 3 year old is autistic. Like most boys, they can play off each other and make our lives a living hell. So after being dragged through an airport for 6 hours, sitting in a plane quietly wasn't happening. Now, I'll admit they were making a bit of noise, but for them they weren't actually being that bad. Yet someone complained, and the flight attendant had to ask my wife if she could try to quiet them down. My wife flatly said "nope", and the flight attendant dropped the matter.

She was just doing her job, and in all honesty, she was about the best person we spoke to during this point in the journey. She got a few little booklets for the boys that could be signed by flight staff on each flight to document the flights they were on (which we did, on every flight). She made sure they boys were happy and got my wife some rum and coke to mellow her out (we paid for it, but she got it to us before she served others). I've got some great pictures of their first takeoff, and apparently we go to Kings Dominion too much because my 3 year old threw his hands in the air and went, "WEEEEEE".

After a couple hours, we're finally in Florida. We get off the plane, and my wife and I have a bit of a heated argument about the plans. She was speaking with American and two separate reps told her Fort Lauderdale (original flight) was south of us in Miami, and that we should have our bags flown to Atlanta. I held strong that Fort Lauderdale was about a 35 minute drive north, and on the way. She eventually went into "fine if you know so much" mode, and I'm guessing waited for me to be wrong. Thankfully I'm better at map reading than American Airlines reps, so that never happened. Trying to rent a car became our next hurdle...

Apparently not carrying a credit card comes with some downsides. No one wants to rent a car to you without one, and none of them would run our (mastercard) bank cards as credit. It's around 7PM, and after going through Enterprise, Alamo, and another one my wife talked to, she calls up our bank/insurance company, and they help us out by reserving the car for us through Avis, so that all we had to do was show ID. They get us into a very new Dodge Caravan that fits us all (plus luggage) pretty comfortably. About forty minutes later, we pull into FLL. My wife had written her name in gold ink across the top of our luggage before she checked it, so she essentially ran in, said her name, and they pointed to our luggage. Onward to Atlanta!

We got back on the highway around 8:30PM, and shortly after had our first meal of the day at Wendy's. The drive was hell. Around 1AM I needed a nap and my wife took over. I woke up around 2:30AM and hopped back on the wheel. Sometime around 6AM I was pretty much spent, and had to have my wife drive for a while again. We get into Atlanta at about 8:30AM, with two hours until our appointment time. We hunt for breakfast, and find an IHOP a couple miles away from the office. We eat breakfast, and still have plenty of time to park and get in there early.

The passport process for us was pretty easy. I think the only hiccup was that we forgot to get pictures taken beforehand, but there was a CVS across the street and they do passport photos for a fee. We get back, finish the paperwork and hand everything in around noon, and are told to come back around 3:30PM to pick them up. There was also a Hard Rock Cafe across the street...

We head over to unwind, grab some drinks, and try to relax a bit. There was a stage set up in the back area (that was completely empty), and I got some great photos of my wife and son dancing around while music was playing. It was a good meal, and sorely needed. My wife began booking a flight to Puerto Rico (which was it's own hassle), since we now knew we were getting our passports (we didn't want to book until we had them, or at least knew for a fact we were getting them). The new flights, the rental car, and expedited passports set us back around an extra $4000, but we were now in a position to at least get 4 days on the ship. On a side note, if you can avoid it, don't wait and try to get passports done in a day. That was about 220/person for the four of us. The only upside to that is that ours are good for 10 years, and our kids' are good for 5 years, so at least it wasn't a one time use type thing.

The only flight we're able to get has a pretty bad layover in Miami. We got in around 11PM, and our next flight wasn't until 7AM the next morning. Everything was closed when we got there (except the convenience store that closed with us shopping in it), and we all pretty much passed out on the floor. We had fallen asleep in the terminal our plane was supposed to be in, which got changed to the other side of the area when we woke up. So around 5AM we caught a skytram to the terminal we needed. For these flights, we were able to check an extra bag (2 on the first flight we missed, 3 this time) which eased the transition a bit. However, due to a mechanical issue with a hatch in the baggage area, we ended up getting stuck on the runway for about 90 minutes. Around 10:30AM, we finally arrive in Puerto Rico, 5.5 hours before our ship was set to arrive.

We've never been to PR before, so we don't know much about it. My wife talks to some of the airport staff, and they get us a taxi. The taxi drive spoke almost no English, but we were able to convey that we wanted to grab lunch and kill time before the ship arrived. He took us to a local diner/hotel that could hold our luggage while we ate. The food was way better than I was expecting. I had a fillet mignon on the ship that wasn't as tender as this place made a skirt steak. I could have cut it with a fork. Afterwards we called the taxi guy again, and ended up paying him $100 just to drive us around for a while and show us the island. We got to see a lot of the historical places we would have paid way more for through shore excursions. Eventually he drops us off at a bar right in front of our ships port, and we kill time by getting some drinks and chatting with some other groups that also missed their flights.

The time on the ship was fairly uneventful. My kids got kicked out of the daycare setup they had on the ship, but just for one night. We had formal photos taken which are the first actual family pictures we've ever had taken of us so far. My wife and I went to a "mystery theater" dinner, and during it the cast gave us cards to write down who we thought did it, and why, and the closest person got a prize. I actually guessed the entire motive about mid-way through, wrote it on the card, showed my whole table, and ended up winning the prize. I liked the hat, but my wife didn't like the champagne (and I don't drink), so we ended up giving it to our friend for helping with the boys. The couples at our table got so caught up in this story, they took us out on the last night to the steak place on the ship and paid our way. Even the flight back wasn't too bad, we were able to check 4 bags this time which made it way easier getting on and off the planes. We got off the ship at 6:30AM and didn't get home until 10PM, but it wasn't a lot of sitting around, just moving from place to place.

My wife now wants to do a "do-over" vacation in the spring... I don't know if I can handle it. I'm not going to lie, this vacation makes for one hell of a story, and I have some really good memories even during the time where everything was going to crap, but I really needed a vacation during my vacation. It's been more relaxing going back to work now that I've been through all this.

Fun story.. was glad to see it eventually had a happy ending of sorts. Sidenote, if you spent $7000 on a $3000 vacation and can have a "do-over" in the spring, that's pretty cool. A lot of people would have had to publish the story just to recover some of the funds for the first one.

I spent a lot of long nights working overtime to build our savings up. I'm about to have to start pulling a lot more to get them back where they were.

All in all it ended up being around $10k, when you factor in food for the first week, gas for two cars, gas in the rental, airport food, alcohol for both weeks, etc. I would love to go after American/US Airways (they merged), just not sure how. They were essentially responsible for the worst of it.

Uffdah, way worse than any canceled flight stories I have ever had. Why did you need a passport for flying to Puerto Rico? Its an American protectorate, and when I went there for work never needed to show my passport to anyone.

It was an issue with the cruise. If we had left Fort Lauderdale and returned to that port, it's considered a closed loop cruise, which doesn't require one. Because we caught the ship at Puerto Rico, then sailed outside US territory, then returned to a different port, we were considered open-loop passengers and a passport is required to get through customs.

This situation is probably the reason the cruise lines recommend you have one anyway. If we hadn't had to go through all that, we could have caught the flight to Miami, stayed in a hotel until Tuesday morning, then hopped a flight out with a lot more sleep and a good deal more money in our pockets.

Edit: One of our favorite pictures. We were getting ready for formal night and our 3 year old was glued to the mirror admiring himself...

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/cT7cTmj.png)

PurEvil wrote:

I would love to go after American/US Airways (they merged), just not sure how. They were essentially responsible for the worst of it.

This is the place to start, but I don't know how much success you'll have. It's standard across most airlines that seats start being freed up for people flying standby 15 minutes before departure time. They start with people that haven't checked in at all, but will give away the seats of people that checked in at the front counter but haven't yet made it to the gate area. The only way around that I can think of would have been to have sent everyone else to the gate to check in there while you waited for the TSA to finish. But the long lines that held you up for so long were due to the FAA glitch, so there might be some form of compensation they can give you.