Day 2 - It's Christmas Morning!! Woo-hoo! Sleep in, open some presents, share a nice breakfast with family, relax in front of a Christmas movie or two or maybe some sportsball on the tv. Oh, wait... none of that was in store for us.
Up early to catch some of that awesome 6am hotel breakfast!
Actually, after the microwave airport pizza and microwave pot pies for Christmas eve, it was a pretty good breakfast. Full of food, we got our Lyft back to the airport and headed in to get ourselves to Sacramento. I did fail to mention that all during the previous day's delays, we had my wife's family in Chico being strung along as well. Plus, our daughter had headed out a few days earlier to spend time with family and friends on the west coast. It's about an hour and a half drive to the airport, so they were trying to make sure somebody was going to be able to head to the airport and get us when/if we showed up.
Got to the airport and things were looking good. Flight was on time for 8:30am. No, wait... a little delay. 9am - no problem. Hey, look, there's one of our friends from the line from the night before! Sadly, she had slept in the airport as she was on standby for her flight and without a boarding pass she would have been stuck outside security if she had left overnight (there seems to be a flaw in the system). Just about 9am and here comes an announcement. Not cancelled, just delayed again - waiting for cabin crew. This is starting to sound very familiar and not in a good way. Same process as the day before, every 15 minutes or so the departure time is pushed back 15 minutes. Same thing with ALL the flights. Really, ALL of them. Nothing is leaving, everything is delayed for lack of crew.
There's crew all over the airport, ready to go. Just not any full crew for any individual flight. We chat with some of the crew folks - they want to go, willing to switch flights, willing to go anywhere. And here's where, to me, there's a pretty large logical disconnect. For the sake of easy math I'm rounding numbers... say there are 20 flights that morning, each needs 6 crew, each has 4 crew. I know it wouldn't work out perfectly, but that would appear to mean that there's enough crew to man 13 flights and get those going?? Or how about 10?? Alright, I think I would have been vaguely happy if 2 or 3 flights had gone out. Yes, it's not that easy. After all the news stories and posts and viral videos of the next 3 days we came to learn that it was an antiquated computer system that couldn't handle swapping out crews (and planes) at such a high volume. How on earth even a 20 year old computer system can't handle flip-flopping crew members (or even planes - almost the entire SWA fleet is the same type of plane) is beyond me.
Okay, enough of that rant. 10:30am and we are cancelled. Luckily we were some of the first to see it on the app, before they announced it, so we were somewhat close to the front of the line. During the hour long wait, we are scanning every single flight from Dallas Love Field or Dallas Fort Worth airports to ANYWHERE in California. There's nothing. Not a single seat on any flight. Zip. Hearing people leaving the desk saying the best they got was 12/28 - three days later. Not an option since that is the day we are flying to Anaheim. So, we make a decision.
And book a car for the 26 hour drive to Sacramento. We get to the desk and fully give up. Cancel our flight, give us back our money, tell us where our luggage is. Responses "okay, you are cancelled... can't give your money back because it's the second half of a two-leg flight you have to call...your luggage might be here but might be in Sacramento already ask downstairs at the luggage desk." Downstairs we go to the luggage desk at about 11:30am. Line appears to be at least an hour. My wife walks through the rows and piles of luggage scattered everywhere searching for our bags to no avail. We ask a manager as they walk by to scan our receipts to see where our luggage is (it's easy, we know they can do it) - he refuses and tells us as well as everyone else, 'your luggage will be at your destination, most of it already left.' I head out to get the rental car while my wife stays in line, hoping for someone who will actually check where our bags are. By the time I get back, she has had zero luck and the line has barely moved so we bail out.
Our home for the next 26 hours... a fabulous Toyota Carolla. Gotta throw out a positive here - the rental guy at Enterprise was great. He did the normal attempt to upsell me to a nicer car or get 5 different levels of insurance, but wasn't at all pushy about it and did it quickly while getting me processed and into the car. Thank you, Mr. Enterprise guy!
A little background on the Brifraz family before we continue this adventure. We drive. A lot. We do the 900 mile each way drive to Disney World at least once a year and sometimes more. We've driven across the US 2.5 times (the half trip was after we got married we flew to California, loaded up a cargo van with stuff and drove it back to Maryland) and from Maryland to Vancouver and back once. At one point we did over 30 hours straight from our house to the north side of Yellowstone National Park. We enjoy driving and seeing the country. So, the 26 hours from Dallas to Chico is no problem. In fact, let's enjoy it!
By the time we are really on the road it's about noon and the magical GPS lady is telling us we will arrive at Sacramento airport at 2pm the next day (which is actually noon because we are about to gain 2 hours in time zone changes). A little concern creeps in when just a very short time into the drive we encounter this interchange in the Dallas Fort Worth area.
And that was just a small portion of the full interchange - I think there were 6 different ramps waiting for completion. Not all that strange in a major construction project, but a bit alarming as you start an unwanted 26 hour drive!! About an hour into things and we realize that we haven't eaten anything since 6am, so we look for a place to stop. Uh-oh. It's Christmas day and there are even fewer places open than on Christmas Eve. Zero fast food places are open along the road. We see a Chinese restaurant with a packed parking lot, but don't want to sit down to eat and definitely don't want to try to do Chinese food while driving. Also see a Golden Corral which is not only full, BUT THERE IS A LARGE LINE OUTSIDE. This scares me a bit in terms of what Americans will wait in line for, but regardless it won't work for us. So, it's whatever we can find at a gas station.
Christmas lunch it is! I should note that the place we stopped did have heating racks and warmers for cooked food, but nothing there (after all, it's Christmas). I guess, on the good side, it meant that our pit stop was only a minute or two long! Remember how I mentioned that we like driving and seeing the country. Well, the northwestern portion of Texas does not have all that much to see.
The juxtaposition of oil derricks and windmills seemed very interesting.
Just seemed to sum up what western Texas is pretty succinctly.
Woo-hoo! Roadside attractions! A little bit of Hester and Chester's right here in the flesh (or the plastic or metal or whatever).
Tumbleweeds!! Sadly, we only ever saw a couple tumbling - mostly on the side of the road, but one did in fact tumble across the road in front of our car. We may have had a little party when that happened.
Apologies to anyone on here who might live in northwestern Texas. I'm sure there are some exciting places and interesting things to see, but we sure didn't see any of it along the way from Dallas to Amarillo and I40. If we had some extra time, we were just a few miles from Oklahoma in a couple places and I could've crossed that one off the list as well, but just getting to family was the only priority. I'll be back later as we head into the night across the southwest of the US.
, I have recently learned that said club has quite the reputation for violence in Dallas. Glad we didn't know at the time!
