Along with about a third of the population of North America we planned to travel this holiday season. In our case it meant a trip to Kalamazoo MI for a gathering of the clan, the first in over 2 years. We booked the flights several weeks ago optimizing for cost over schedule. As a result we were booked on a 6AM flight.

I’ve been traveling a fair bit recently, Chicago and LA this month alone, so when the time came to drive to the airport, 3:30AM thank you very much, I was on auto-pilot. Of course, we scheduled this flight long before we knew my company party would be happening the night before, nor that L’s company party would be the night before that. Needless to say we were zombies.

We make great time; arrive at the off-airport parking lot, hop in the shuttle, bounce our way to the terminal and queue up with the other zombies waiting to check in. We pounce on a ‘self check-in kiosk’ and jam the credit card in to get our reservation. Hmm… nothing found. No worries, I’ll just enter in the destination airport code, AZO. Double-Hmm… nothing found. I enter the confirmation number – bzzzt! No check in for you! Now, I’m worried.

I check the confirmation that I printed from the airline website…. Date: check, Airline: check, Time: check, Airport: ‘MHT’ – WTF? Oh FRACK!

We live about ½ between two significant airports, Boston’s Logan and Manchester, New Hampshire. Logan in one of the nation’s major airports serving 39 million people a year; Manchester, a bit less. 😉 I prefer to fly from Manchester as it is a breeze to deal with; cheap abundant parking within walking distance to the terminal, security lines that hover around 0 and a shiny new terminal with a Starbucks. The downside is that there are only a handful of airlines and generally higher fares compared to Logan.

The memory of booking this flight was still sleeping when we left the house so my auto-pilot said “Go to airport? – last time it was Logan so let’s go there.”

Needless to say there were no flights to be had out of Logan the Friday before Christmas so the airline recommended (after they stopped laughing) that we drive to Manchester and wait on standby for a flight out. After the second flight left with no available seats we bagged it for the day and booked seats for the following day. We went to the ticket counter to collect our bags – turns out they made it onto one of the ‘full’ flights and were on their way to AZO without us. Sigh.

We then head out to grab a shuttle to the parking lot. As we approach the lot the driver notices that someone has stolen his remote to the gate. We wait for the next bus to come along and open it for us. It’s not been a good day.

We made it to AZO the next day without incident only to wait in line for 30m to retrieve our bags.

Merry frackin’ Christmas.