A Bad Beginning

Well, by now Ronghua and I should have been half-way to China. Unfortunately, where we are is sitting around a room at the Comfort Inn on Tyvola. Needless to say, things haven't went according to plan.

Originally, we were supposed to leave Charlotte at 8:24 PM for a two-hour flight to NYC. In New York, we had two hours to make our connecting flight to South Korea. When we first got to the airport, our departure was already delayed by about half an hour. Still plenty of time for the connection. At about eight o'clock, it was changed to departing at 10PM. This was really tight for our connection. I explained the situation to the guy at the desk. He immediately called the office to start working on contingency plans for us.

The problem seemed to be a storm front in the midwest. Our flight was coming to Charlotte from Columbus, Ohio. Because of the storms, the plane couldn't depart Columbus. When the plane finally left Columbus, our departure was changed to 9:45PM, still workable for us. Then disaster struck. US Airways decided to use our scheduled aircraft to carry different passengers to a different destination; our new aircraft would be arriving from KC with a scheduled departure for us of 10:50PM. So we were stuck.

About this time, the woman from the office arrived with a couple of options for us. One was to leave Charlotte Wednesday morning, go to Chicago, Seoul (where we would have a 14 hour layover!), and on to Tianjin at 10:30 Friday morning. The second was a Wednesday afternoon flight to LAX (with a 7-hour layover), then to Beijing, arriving at 5:20 AM on Friday. With either choice, she would comp us a room at Comfort Inn. We chose the second option.

I really do appreciate the hard work that the woman from USAirways put in to creating this new itinerary. She said she tried her best to get us to Tianjin on Thursday, but she was just stonewalled at every turn. USAirways only responsibility was to get us to NYC. They could have just dumped us there (albeit late) and let us fend for ourselves. But Kimberly L. went the extra mile and made sure we at least had a workable itinerary, even if not ideal.

Hopefully, the next post will come from China!