Annual Maine Trip Fiasco–I mean Report!

We are in Maine for our annual trip.  I wish I could say the journey was easy, but I can’t because it wasn’t.

We were scheduled to fly out of San Jose on Friday night after work.  The flight was at 10:45 and would fly us into Boston where we would catch a connecting flight to Augusta where my mother currently lives.  We had a friend scheduled to give us a ride and so after work we ventured out to Rob’s parents house where the ride was going to pick us up at seven.

We were early but that was okay because Rob’s brother was in town with his twin sons and it was nice to see them again for even just a minute.

As we were saying goodbye to them so they could go back to their hotel, I whipped out my phone to take a picture and noticed a notification from JetBlue saying our reservation was cancelled.

Ummmm, what?

Long story short, Rob spent about a half an hour or so on hold and then speaking with the Jetblue staff.  The flight was cancelled due to weather on the east coast and there was nothing to be done about it.  We were rebooked on the same flight for the next night.  We were now going to be missing a full day of our vacation.

There is a reason we book the red eye out on a Friday night.  I only get a certain number of vacation days a year and I want to obviously maximize them if I can.  When flying to Maine we lose almost two days traveling time so to lose another day was NOT cool.

Having said that, we went home and regrouped.  There were only a couple of things that needed to be rescheduled and it didn’t seem like that bad of a crisis in the grand scheme of thing…just extremely frustrating.

The next day we managed to make the flight out of San Jose on time and all seemed right with the world.  We got to our connecting flights gate in Boston and got some Dunkin Donut sandwiches because were were starving at that point and then waited almost two hours for them to tell us our flight was delayed by about an hour.  The next announcement a half an hour later was that the flight was cancelled altogether.

Rob and I were already sleep deprived at this point and pretty much fed up with the airlines shit.  We went up to the desk to see what we could do.  They told us that we could get refunded or we could rebook for the five thirty flight that night–no guarantee that flight wouldn’t be cancelled either.

After speaking with a slightly more informative employee we were told there was a bus that was leaving in fifteen minutes that could take us to Augusta and get us there by one.  It was nine fifteen in the morning at that point.  We were told they would have to pull our bags from the current flight (what flight?? It was cancelled!!) and then we would have to race down and catch the bus.  The instructions were all very vague but I was over flying at that point and told Rob we should just get the bus.

We ran downstairs and I went to retrieve the bags while Rob jetted out to catch the bus that no one seemed to know where it was.  We made friends with another guy in the same boat and between the three of us we finally found the bus stop…where about 50 other people were waiting for the same bus.

About fifteen minutes later the bus finally pulled up and due to a weird quirk of fate, we were finally in the right place at the right time and were one of about 15 that got to board that already almost full bus.

That bus took us from Boston to Portland and then dumped us out at a station to catch another bus Augusta.  We were last in line for that one and were very worried we wouldn’t get on, but thankfully we did.

FINALLY, after trying to start this trip on Friday night, we actually arrived at our destination at around 1:30 today.

The only shining beacon of hope in this story so far is that our contact at the HERTZ rental desk in Augusta is an absolute angel and goes above and beyond to make sure we get our rental car.

You see dear readers, this is not the first time that Jetblue has bent us over like this.  Last year almost the exact same thing happened.  We figured it was a fluke, but the bottom line is that the HERTZ desk in Augusta isn’t open on Sundays.  Both trips we risked not getting our rental car and further ruining our plans, but Michelle has saved our butts both times.  She got all the nessesary info from us including photos of our drivers licences and signature all via email and then had someone at the airport hold the keys and the paperwork for the car until we could get there to pick it up even though they were officially closed.  If I ever meet Michelle, I’m buying her a steak dinner…or a diamond…or you know, just giving her a really big hug.

So she came through for us yet again and we were able to uber (yes, Maine finally has those now) over to the airport and get our rental car.

Since we hadn’t planned on coming into Maine on Easter Sunday we had an initial plan of stopping at a grocery store to get stocked up for our Airbnb and then getting our favorite take out food from a local restaurant. Well, as it turns out there isn’t Jack Crap open in August on Easter Sunday.  No grocery stores, not even WALMART for crying out loud!  EVERYTHING was closed.  We managed for find a Subway that was opened and got some sandwiches to bring back to my mom and for us to eat later.

Finally we got to see my mom for a few hours but exhaustion was overtaking us.  We bid mom farewell for the night and headed over to the Airbnb we booked where we are currently relaxing in our PJ’s and will probably not last much longer before heading into sleepy-nigh-nigh-land.

So we basically lost two whole days of our short one week trip and I’m not pleased about it, but I know there isn’t a whole helluva lot we can do about it.

I’m never flying into Maine in April ever again!!!