My Recent flight experience to the US

Travelling alone is never a fun, unless you want to utilize it as an opportunity to do some introspection or you want to convert it into your personal time.

I started another trip to the US, first in this year. I started from Hyderabad on a Saturday morning. The flight took off on time and the inflight entertainment was good. I watched a movie “The Switch’ and it was a good drama. The flight landed in Heathrow on time and I had a plenty of time to board my next flight to Chicago. I was just hanging around and taking some pictures of the Heathrow airport. Then, I boarded into the flight to Chicago, which was on time. The food that is served in the flight was good. I had some good sleep as well. The flight arrived into O’Hare, Chicago by 30 minutes late. The ground staff gave an express transfer tag and that helped me in expediting the immigration queue. I was at the gate at 8:15 PM and the American Airlines is scheduled to leave at 8:45 PM.

The flight got delayed by 30 mins and from there on, it gets delayed by hour by hour and so on. Finally at around 12 in the night, there was an announcement that the flight to Chicago was cancelled. They gave us a hotel voucher and the boarding pass to the next day morning’s flight. I went out of the airport to take a shuttle to the hotel. It was very cold outside and I waited there for about half an hour for the shuttle to come. I got into the hotel at around 1 AM and tried to sleep for few hours. I did not want to rely on the alarm and went back to the airport by 5:45 AM.

There was a big queue at the security check and it took a while to pass through it. I went to the gate by 6:30 AM and the departure was showing that the Flight is on time. I was happy that I will be in KC by 9 AM or so, hoping that I could take some rest. But, this flight too got delayed by an hour. The gate was opened and we got into the flight. Then, the crew asked us to go back and remain seated as there was some technical problem in starting the engine! Everyone in the flight was scared. I went back to the gate and they called us after 30 mins, so finally we got into the fight and it took off  everyone was clapping and treating it as a most awaiting moment in their lives. We were told that the flight will arrive into KC by 9:45 AM. At around 9:30 AM, the captain announced that the visibility is very poor and he will keep trying to land hoping the weather would improve. He went in circles for about 20 mins and finally announced that they are going to land us in St. Louis. I arrived into St. Louis at 10 AM. There I waited for about 3 hours only to hear that this flight also got cancelled. Everyone was upset. We got and luggage back on the belt and de-boarded. I was so sick of waiting any more. I decided to take a rental car and drive to KC. There were a couple of other passengers who wanted to join me. I took the car from AVIS and drove all the way to KC. It was raining heavily and the conditions were not that good to drive, especially after a long flight and the amount of mental agony that I gone through.

I finally reached the hotel and checked into it at around 12 in the night. I decided not to go to work on the next day and wanted to take a complete rest to be in a better shape for Tuesday morning.

This is the 2nd such bad experience in my last 3 visits, and this instance in particular is very rough. The only relief part of this entire journey was that, I did not miss the luggage.