The means of flying in this day and age have gotten harder and harder. Airport security since 9/11 has become significantly stricter and there’s nothing we can do about it except be well prepared when traveling. I’ve sure learned my lesson from this experience and will never again fail to recognize that if things can go wrong, they most certainly will.
Earlier this summer, my family and I were traveling to the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas for a relaxing vacation after finals week. I personally was looking forward to gambling in the casinos and relaxing by the blue sparkling water with a piña colada in my hand. What I failed to recognize was the means of travel to get there. Little did I know, the airport journey would be a story in itself as the worst travel experience I have ever had.
Our journey began when we left for the airport. Of course, we arrived about 45 minutes late because we got into construction traffic and my brother just had to go to the post office to drop off some letters to mail before leaving for a week. When we finally got to the airport, the machine to check us in wasn’t working and the printer was broken. We couldn’t print our baggage tickets. We finally managed to get to the gate and take off for Fort Lauderdale. We arrived at 1:30 p.m.. Our connection plane to Nassau was destined to leave at 3:10; however, due to some mechanical difficulties, we had to wait until they fixed the aircraft. We waited in the Fort Lauderdale airport from 2:45 to 5:30, at which point they cancelled the flight. The woman at the counter told us she was going to send us on a 5:45 flight to Freeport and then catch another plane to Nassau. However, 45 minutes later, she found out that option was no longer possible. So, since Continental Airlines didn’t have any more planes going to Nassau that night, Continental decided to get us out to Nassau on an American Airlines flight from Miami so we had to take a car to Miami International and fly out at 9:10 p.m..
We arrived at the airport just fine, but made the mistake of not picking up our bags and re-checking them, which ultimately led to us losing four of our five bags upon arriving in Nassau. And, of course, we still had security to get through. At the security checkpoint in Miami, our family was randomly selected to go through intense screening where they opened all our bags and looked through them and put our bodies in air-blower machines to check for concealed weapons. We arrived at the gate and waited until 9:00 when we went to get in line. They started boarding the plane but then they stopped everyone and made them turn around, saying that there was something wrong with the plane and we would have to wait a little longer to line up. They decided to start re-boarding on a new and functional plane at 10 p.m..
Finally, we lined up and loaded into busses that would take us to the plane. So my brother, my mom and I got into the first bus while my dad boarded the second. The entire first bus loaded the plane, but then they held up boarding the second bus because they thought the plane was going to be overweight. My dad finally got on and sat down in his seat ready for take-off. We took off at 10:50 and arrived in Nassau at 11:40, to find that only one of our five bags made it there ok. We waited an hour trying to find the other four bags, but then gave up and got a taxi. We arrived at the hotel at half past midnight, got out of the taxi and checked in. Of course, my parents just had to talk to the man at the front desk for a half an hour about all the great features our hotel had to offer.
We finally got up to the room only to find that my dad was missing his briefcase that contained food, clothes, and all of our passports and immigration forms. We searched all over the lobby for it at 1:30 in the morning but didn’t find it anywhere. We thought we would have had to spend the next day in the U.S. embassy trying to get all new passports, but fortunately woman who drove us to the hotel delivered his briefcase to the hotel at 4:30 in the morning. The suitcases ended up arriving at the hotel at noon the next day.
Allison Cooley is a sophomore accounting major. She can be reached at [email protected].
