vacation no more

so. i'm home. i guess i really won't step foot in snow! here's my story in 20 steps:

1. get to the airport slighty after 8am, for our flight at 10am. our flight was with alaska airlines, flying to boise, idaho with a 25 minute layover before flying to bozeman airport in montana.

2. board airplane at a little before 10am. pretty small plane, two seats on each side, and plane actually had propellers like those old-school planes. a little scary.

3. sit on plane for ~45 minutes. captain tells the passengers that they need to shut off all power/engine to the plane to reset since their computers aren't working properly.

4. sit in an extremely stuffy plane for 20 minutes while they shut all power off to the plane.

5. finally tell us that we need to deplane, the restart of the plane was not successful and they'd have to fly in a part from portland.

6. we were obviously going to miss our connecting flight and there were no other flights to bozeman. all other possible routes to bozeman out of sj, sfo, oak, and through other cities were completely booked. no flights from boise to bozeman on saturdays.

7. about to cancel everything, but a very nice alaska airlines employee spent like an hour trying to get us to our destination. we ended up with rooms in doubletree hotel in boise for tonight, a flight from boise to idaho falls saturday morning, and a driver to pick us up from idaho falls instead. and $150 in food vouchers. (not including the $24/person in food vouchers we had gotten for sj airport throughout the day. unfortunately, we were in terminal C, so we had $24 to spend at our choice of: burger king, togos, and mr. jalapeno) we cancelled our hotel in yellowstone for tonight, extended our trip by a day, and reschedule all our satuday activities for monday.

8. part arrives at around 2:30, maintenance works on the plane.

9. 4pm, when we were supposed to board, get another announcement that plane still isn't working

10. 4:30pm, get an annoucnement that the plane won't work. need to fly another plane in from portland, which will arrive at 8pm, and we would depart at 8:30pm.

11. WHY DIDN'T THEY DO THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE?!

12. sit around... for TWELVE HOURS with every other passenger on our flight (full flight). some passengers had actually come from LA, with a layover in SJ, so had been up and travelling since earlier than 5am.

13. plane from portland arrives. board plane a little before 8:30pm.

14. sit on plane again for another ~30 minutes. finally get an annoucement from the crew saying that they didn't know they were flying to boise, they got rerouted, they're working on paperwork. they also need to add more fuel to the plane because the weather conditions are getting worse and they may not be able to land right away. and there's a chance they may not be able to land in boise, but may have to land in some other surrounding airport.

15. huge, huge collective groans from all passengers because of all the hell they've been put through today.

16. sit on plane for another 15 minutes. my mom starts to feel really sick. two passengers get off flight. we eventually follow suit and end up getting off.

17. collect our baggage, cancel everything. hotel, flights, vacation, all of it. get refunded on tickets. need to go through alaska customer care to have them reimburse us for all cancellation fees. i checked, the plane finally departed at 9:45pm. that's 11 hours and 45 minutes later than scheduled. and the super irritating part is that NONE of it was due to weather, it was all completely alaska airline's fault. this is definitely the worst travel experience i've ever had. weather is not controllable, but this totally was.

18. i spent two hours on a plane, only to arrive nowhere. got home about 20 minutes ago, 14 hours later.

19. and now i have 10 days of vacation with nothing planned.

20. someone please play with me!