The One Where We Miss Our Flight

By the time you're reading this, I will be 75% through my Disneyworld Florida vacation, and probably running on fumes after three days of park hopping.

But I'm writing this?  Sitting in the airport for going on 3 hours, because we I did the unthinkable.

We missed our flight.

Leisure time at the John Wayne Airport

(Because they wanted to share, Sister Singer is reading Castmember Confidential by Chris Mitchell, Sister Swimmer listening to The World As I Know It by Jason Mraz, and Hubster engrossed in One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School by Scott Turow.) 

In the most uncharacteristic thing I've done in years, I managed to memorize the time of our departing flight to Florida wrong, and never bothered to double check.  Granted I was traveling with three other adults who could have checked the time also, but that's neither here nor there.  It was my fault, I had taken charge of all of the details of the trip, and the feeling of messing it up is mortifying.

Wanna know how we found out?

Sure you do.

We waltzed into the airport a little after 6:00am, for what I thought was our 7:24am flight, thinking we had planned it perfectly and would get through check-in and security right at the time boarding started.  We waited about 30 minutes in line, and when we tried to check-in on the self-service computer, an error message popped up saying something along the lines of too close to departure time - please contact representative.  Thinking the machine had an error, I asked the first agent who walked by for help, who asked us when our departure time was.  When we answered 7:24am, he informed us there were no flights departing at 7:24am that morning.

Obviously now (not in the days or hours prior to departing, of course - that would be silly) was the time to confirm our flight time, and when I looked up my itinerary on my phone, I was horrified - I had mistaken the time, our flight was departing in 20 minutes.

People who have zero sense of urgency?  Airline customer service agents, for future reference.  There was zero mention of getting us quickly checked in and back to the gate - our only option was to rebook for a later flight.

After lots of apologies, a few tears on my part, and an initial verdict of having to split our group of four into two different planes - we were rebooked for an 11:45am flight, still brining us into Orlando late tonight.  (I'm pretty sure the tears helped, FYI, if you ever find yourself in a similar situation.)

A bumpy morning it's been, but I was so grateful for the grace my beautiful mature Sisters handled the situation with.  I would not have been quite so understanding at their age.  Handsome Hubster however...he's just sad he won't get to meet Mickey tonight.