Day 13: Saturday, June 18, 2005
September 21, 2005
We woke up early to meet in the lobby at 5:30am and packed into the vans and headed for the airport. Because the van rental people were not to be found, Bill, Lisa, and Al abandoned the vans beneath the check in area. Our plane was delayed by one hour so by the time we made it to the airport in Miami we only had one hour to get to our next flight. I lost track of Bill and Fina in the massive lines in the flight checkout area. I waited 30 minutes in line before I finally just cut in the front to try and make my connecting flight. I navigated my way through the maze of terminals past more security checkpoints and finally made it to the last security checkpoint but I didn’t have a boarding pass so I had to go to the flight desk for one. There was only 15 min before the flight took off and they wouldn’t give me a pass with less than 20 min to go.
The lady at the flight desk was trying to rebook me for a flight the next day or the day after but she wasn’t having any luck so she gave me an emergency over right pass to get on the plane. At this point there was less than 10 minutes left so I ran to the front of the line at security and they thoroughly examined my carry on, the bottoms of my feet, ran me over with a metal detector, and patted me down. After 8 agonizing minutes they finally let me through and I ran past 9 gates to get to mine with 1 minute to go, but the lady said I was too late and she sold my ticket! She checked the computer and said there was one seat left in the back of the plane I could have, but at this point I clearly didn’t care were I was sitting as long as I could get on the plane! So they opened up the boarding doors and let me onto the plane with less than one minute before scheduled take off. Fortunately the flight from St. Paul Minnesota to Saskatoon was less eventful.
Upon reaching Saskatoon Bill found he had no luggage (as usual for him) and I was missing one of mine. Apparently despite the announcement on the plane of not having to check our luggage if we were on a connecting flight from Miami , we really did have to check our luggage. Fina checked hers and one of mine; how she even found time for that I’m not sure. When we got into the unsecured area in the airport we found three of the students that would be working in Saskatoon , who took different connecting flights to get here, had no luggage at all. This is a problem, since they now would have no samples to start working on and they only have two weeks to work in the Saskatoon lab. |
