Here’s a quick summary of my story . . . well, not so quick . . .
We arrived in New Orleans on Friday, after a 4 hour weather delay. Our flight out of New Orleans was supposed to be Tuesday. As the predictions for New Orleans began to look worse and worse, we called Delta on Saturday to re-schedule and got two of the few available seats out of town on a flight scheduled for 3pm on Sunday. (The weather was still supposed to be okay at 3pm on Sunday, and it was. The actual hurricane winds hit on Monday am). This would have been a flight to Cincinnati. We decided to try to accept that the last couple days of our vacation would be in Cincinnati.
We did tourist-stuff all day Saturday and got back to our hotel at around midnight. The hotel had put notices under every door stating that Delta had cancelled all flights on Sunday. We called Delta and couldn’t reach anyone helpful on the phone. CNN showed people sitting in the airport, with virtually no airline staff and no information regarding possible flights because it was about 2am at this time. We called other airlines and hit brick-walls regarding any possible flights out of town. We weren’t sure if we should head for the airport and hope for the best, or stay at our hotel. I was not sure whether the hotel or the airport would be a safer place to be stranded and blasted by wind and water. We called all of the rental car companies . . . no cars were left. Greyhound said that they had cancelled all buses in and out of the city.
We were feeling like we were out of options to leave town and went out at 2:30am looking for a store in which to purchase food and water since we figured that we might be there for many days, stuck in a hotel. I was honestly wishing that I knew how to hotwire a car. I assume that many of the cars I saw sitting there that night are now under water, anyway. If the next day was not a Sunday I would have planned to find a used car lot and buy a car. We were feeling desperate. Evacuation of the city was not yet considered mandatory.
We asked some cab drivers about taking us out of town. We found a set of cabs that were prepping to take 41 “foreigners” to Memphis for $950 per cab. (They were charging about $2 per mile at that point). We asked a bunch of cabs if they would take us to Houston. They all said, “No.” One of the cabbies decided that he’d rather take us to Houston than take others to Memphis, so we loaded up and hit the ATM. It took about 6 hours and cost $780 to get to Houston in that cab. The next morning, the news showed that it was taking people 6 hours to go 30 miles because of traffic. 30 miles wasn’t even out of the danger zone yet.
We rented a car in Houston and booked a flight home, through Atlanta, for Tuesday. We spent the next two days at a beachfront hotel in Galveston, TX. Most of that time was spent watching CNN and the Weather Channel, picturing the horrid situations that we could have been stuck with. Apparently, that was the best $780 I’ve ever spent.
It turns out that the airline didn’t give us good airport info for our flight back from Houston, so we had to re-schedule through Cincinnati. Just before boarding our flight from Cincinnati to Minneapolis, we had to evacuate the airport for a few minutes due to a fire. I was not sure if we’d ever get back home.
We’re not considering this a vacation. It was more of a trip. I need a vacation after that trip!
