Back to Ft. Wayne

Another trip out to Ft. Wayne with a return the next day. This time I tried it in the good hands of Delta Comair via Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport. You know them, they’re the airline that managed to crash a plane Sunday by trying to take-off on too short a runway. The running joke walking along the tarmac to the aircraft was “I hope they use the right runway today.”

We got off an hour late from Newark due to the plane arriving late. That meant all kinds of trouble for the folks on board making a connection. The guy across from me had a connecting flight to Albuquerque leaving 5 minutes before we landed in Cincinnati. Unless his flight was delayed, he spent the night in Kentucky because that was the last flight out.

I was a little better off having about 20 minutes to get to my connecting flight to Ft. Wayne. Unfortunately my flight was leaving from terminal A and I landed at terminal C. For those of you unfamiliar with Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport, that means a shuttle bus ride between terminals, on the runway, while ducking taxing commuter aircraft. I just about made the Ft. Wayne flight run by good old Chautauqua airlines under the Delta banner. However there wasn’t any music, and no inspirational lecturer, just a rather wet and bumpy 20 minute flight.

This time I arrived in Ft. Wayne early enough to get a cookie and managed to finagle a decent car from Avis. Things went downhill from there. The first problem was my cell phone battery was dead. I swore I had a full charge on the thing before I left, and I hadn’t packed a charger for a one day trip, so I had a visit to a local Verizon store in my future.

Driving along Interstate 69 (how do you suppose anyone allowed an Interstate Highway in the moral Midwest to be numbered “69?”) it looked like I was heading into Dante’s Inferno. The skies were black except when punctuated by lightening bolts so big they must have been incinerating acres at a time. Then the emergency broadcast system kicked in with tornado warnings for places I didn’t know. That made it a tad difficult to figure out whether I was heading away from the tornadoes or toward the tornadoes. I thought the specific warning to folks living in trailer parks or mobile homes particularly enlightening.

I managed to get only partially drowned going from the parking lot into the Marriott Courtyard. With some doubts about the intelligence of going out into the weather again, I asked the clerk behind the desk to locate the nearest Verizon store for me and then went upstairs to unpack. When I got back he had Mapquest directions printed out for me for a store about a mile and a half away. Someone in the lobby was walking around in a near panic asking everyone if they knew how far away the tornadoes were. When he asked the clerk, the clerk thought he was asking about the Verizon store he had just given me directions to. When he told the guy about a mile and a half I thought the guy’s eyes were going to pop out. The panic was now complete.

The directions seemed so simple yet I couldn’t find the place. The darkness and the rain didn’t help but ultimately the problem turned out to be it wasn’t a store. It was actually a Verizon office building tucked away in an industrial park that required a U-Turn in order to get to the entrance. Oh well, at least he had tried to help out.

I popped into a Home Depot that was about to close and found only a car charger. A short discussion with a helpful clerk let me find out that was all they had but he suggested I hit the 24-hour WAL-MART down the road.

WAL-MART, the cathedral of Red State America. WAL-MART, the promised land. Whenever I hear the name I always have visions of rednecks burning incense outside while chanting the praises of low retail pricing financed by not providing any medical benefits for the hourly employees that slave there. I figure you could draw a direct line between the tornado warnings including a specific message for trailer park residents and the WAL-MART employee register. Ok, I was desperate. I swallowed my pride and headed for WAL-MART.

It worked out pretty well. Not only did I locate a charger that claimed to work for my phone model but a replacement for the Rightguard confiscated in Newark and a Subway sandwich for dinner. The only problem was when I got back to the hotel, the charger didn’t work. In disgust I sat down to eat my Subway. The only problem with the Subway was they didn’t have any Swiss cheese and I like some Swiss with my turkey.

I did my thing the next day and headed home. The first check came when the young lady at the Delta counter couldn’t print out my boarding pass for the Cincinnati to Newark leg of the trip. After about 20 minutes and getting everyone working for Delta, Northwest and some other airline I didn’t recognize, to look at the problem someone finally figured out that it was because the flight had been CANCELLED! She did manage to get me on a substitute Delta flight an hour later. Now, with a dead cell phone, I had no way of letting the driver picking me up know that both my arrival time in Newark and the terminal I was arriving at had changed so I talked the young lady at the desk into letting me use Delta’s phone. With that squared away I headed for Gate 7 stopping by the free Internet Hook-up to check my e-mail and do a little web surfing. There were several folks enjoying the little aviation museum while I was surfing the web. Two other people were sacked out in the overstuffed armchairs near the computers. I’ve decided I like the Ft. Wayne airport better than any other airport I’ve been in recently.

At Cincinnati I had to reverse my shuttle trip going from terminal A to terminal C but at least I had plenty of time so I turned my attention toward obtaining a quick byte to eat. My choices were Moe’s, McDonald’s or Subway. I ended up eating another turkey sandwich also without any Swiss. Does the Midwest have something against Swiss cheese or what?

The flight was overbooked and the guy at the desk kept asking for volunteers offering a flight an hour later into LaGuardia of all places. He seemed surprised when no one took him up on the deal so I felt like asking him if he had any idea how far away LaGuardia Airport was from Newark Airport?

How they eventually resolved the overbooking situation I don’t know but we took off about 20 minutes late and then circled Newark for an additional 20 minutes. That got me in about 40 minutes late on a flight that was an hour later than my original flight to begin with.

I never check baggage and especially not on puddle jumper flights. Most people don’t but some folks have to because their bags are too big to fit in the tiny overhead compartments on the commuter aircraft. So how come an entire plane of 50+ folks has to wait for the dozen or so bags to be brought forward in front of the wing? Why not let those of us who don’t need to wait for a bag deplane? Delta did do one smart thing, some poor lady was about to miss her Paris flight so they got her off the plane while the rest of use were waiting for the bags to be ready. Intelligence on the part of an airline, what will they think of next?

I located a payphone (an endangered species) to let my driver know I had finally arrived. He took me to pick up my car and I wearily headed home in the rain. I fell into my house around 11 PM. Since I had left for Ft. Wayne airport about 2 PM the trip home had taken about 9 hours. I gave the Ft. Wayne Airport cookie to my wife. She deserves it for putting up with me for all these years.