Jet Blues

What we thought was going to be a fun day in NYC ended up as a nightmare. And I guess I should say that we had a blast doing the things we did. Last night, Dave & I took Matt, Seth and McCall with us to one of his conferences. We scheduled a long layover in New York because that is the one place Matt has always wanted to go. We flew into JFK about 5:30 am and our flight was supposed to leave at 9:30 pm for Fort Lauderdale. We went to see the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty and up to the top of the Empire State Building. After that we went to Times Square and had lunch at ESPNZone. It was a fun place to eat and really good food but at $70 for lunch it was quite pricey. We took Seth to see the Toys R Us, which is so incredibly huge that last time we were in NY with Spencer I spent a couple of hours there just looking at stuff. Then we took Matt to the only NBA Store in the world. They had stuff there for every NBA and WNBA team. Pretty cool for a big basketball fan like him. We made our purchases and headed out the door only to see it POURING rain. Our next stop was to be Central Park which I LOVE, but in a drenching rain, it's not exactly in my top 10. After watching it pour for a while and realizing that it wasn't going to let up, we opted to just head back to the airport a little early. We got back to JFK about 5:oo for our 9:30 flight. After killing some time, we headed to our gate, only to hear a lot of announcements overhead about delayed flights. Come to find out, JFK had been in a "flight management program" since 2:30. For those of you that don't know what this means (like me), it boils down to a nice way to say the whole airport was grounded. The storm that had come in brought flooding rains and lots of lightening which doesn't mix well with flying metal objects with little tiny wheels. By 10:00, we had changed gates in hopes of using a different aircraft. But not so lucky! An hour later, we switched gates again to a gate that had an actual airplane parked at it. But now our problem was that there wasn't a flight crew. After all of the flight diversions and delays, all of the pilots had reached their limit of hours and had to go home. So we waited again. We finally boarded the plane at midnight, thinking that we'd fly into Fort Lauderdale about 3am. Rule #1, don't EVER use logic when figuring flight times. As soon as the cabin doors were shut, the Captain came on overhead and said that we would have a long taxi to the runway. I'm thinking 20-30 minutes, but then he said 2 - 2 1/2 hours! At that, several people totally freaked out and demanded to get off the plane. So they opened up the doors and wasted another 20 minutes letting some off and others that were cancelled from their flight on. ARGGHH! So we headed to the runway at a snails pace, following 200+ flights ahead of us. At 4am, we finally got clearance to take off. We landed at 6:15 am - another night spent sleeping on an airplane! We quickly proceeded to our hotel, since Dave and Matt had reservations on a fishing boat that left at 8:00. They only had a King suite left for us, so we took it and said "thank you" knowing that at least we had a bed. It was such a crazy 36 hours and I wouldn't exactly want to do it again, but we did have fun. I love New York and would love to back soon, just not for only a day.