Our Canceled Flight

Originally, my sister was to drive to Sacramento on Saturday just so that she could get a ride with us on Sunday to the airport. Then, when we would arrive on the 19th, that same cousin that would drop us off on the 12th would pick up my sister and I, drive us to Sacramento, then my sister was to drive back to the Bay Area.

When I heard of this plan, I quickly came up with a new plan because (1) why would my sister need to do a round trip from Fremont to Sacramento and (2) why would my cousin need to do four trips to SF to pick people up four Sundays in a row [1 – initial drop off on the 12th; 2 – picking up my sister and I on the 19th; 3 – picking up my parents and his mom on the 26th; and 4 – picking up his dad on the 26th]. I decided that I would drive my dad’s car to Fremont, leave my dad’s car at my sister’s place. My sister and I would then take BART to SFO and meet my parents and my Aunt Mary and Uncle Roland. Then, when we arrived on the 19th, my sister’s roommate could pick us up…we’d go to Fremont…I spend the night in Fremont…and then drive back to Sacramento on 20th.

Thus, my trip to the Philippines actually began at 9:30 AM on Sunday (in all reality, it began on the Friday before when I left my house in San Diego, but I don’t really count this as part of the traveling to the PI). I got to my sister’s at about 11:30, helped her finish packing (I brought more pencils and some other items from some cousins for her to put into her luggage).

We headed out at around 1:00 PM for the 30 minute walk to the BART station. Our BART ride, from Fremont to SFO, would take us an hour and a half. I’ve never actually spent SO much time on the BART.

Halfway during the BART trip, my sister had to pee, so we exited at the 12th Street Oakland stop to find a bathroom. This stop is in the middle of a business area and on a normal day would have been easy to walk into a restaurant or an office building and find a restroom. Additionally, if it was a normal day, the escalators would have been on. Since it was Sunday, nothing was open and no escalators were working (we couldn’t find any working elevators either).

Someone finally told us that there was a restroom in the parking garage adjacent to the BART station. This would have been easy to get to if there weren’t three stairways to traverse with a 50 lb bag and my sister having to pee. However, once we found the restroom, it was cleaner than I would have expected and used the restroom myself.

XXX

Sunday, July 12, 2009 – 4:00 PM PST

Once we got to SFO and since we hadn’t eaten, we decided to grab some dinner from the food court. I knew that my mom had cooked some dinner for us and was brining all that food with them, so I told my sister to not order too much food. However, since we were both hungry, we did end up getting two complete meals – a personal pizza, two small salads, and fish & chips.

After eating, we went to the check-in counter. On the way there, I had the brilliant idea of checking the departure screen and found out that our flight is CANCELED! In shock, I picked up the phone to call my parents, but they didn’t answer. Next to the arrival and departure screens, there was a phone with phone codes to each airline. I picked up the phone, dialed Philippine Airlines, and listened to the recording: “Our business hours are….and we are closed on Sunday.” I just started to laugh.

After I hung up, my sister looked up and saw my parents and aunt and uncle walk into the airport with our bags. My sister and I ran over to them and told them that our flight was canceled. I asked where our cousin AJ went and that after unloading all of the bags, they told him to go home.

We asked the baggage handler, who thankfully worked for Philippine Airlines, about the flight and he said that he didn’t have any information for us, but that the counter would be open at 6:30 and since we were going to be first in line, that he could put our bags in the front to save our place. There was nothing we could do at that point except for wait till the ticket counter opened up.

As we waited, I talked to Brian who mentioned that he could call Craig to get some info for us since Craig is a travel agent. Brian called me back and said there’s nothing we could do except have a separate plan that we could present to the counter. This would increase our chances of getting onto a different flight.

I then called Rob up to see if he was in front of a computer and asked him to look up some flights for us that were leaving that day. He wasn’t able to find any flights leaving SFO, but he was able to find two flights out of LAX leaving that day that would get us to Manila in time to catch our connecting flight to Laoag – (1) Philippine Airline flight at 10:30 that night and (2) a United flight that left at 12:30 AM.

As we waited for the check-in counter to open up, I asked my parents to let me handle it. My mom gets a little angry when things don’t go right and I knew that a situation like this needed someone who was calm and could use humor to lighten up the situation. I also knew that I can flirt my way through anything to get my way. All my travel companions agreed that I could take care of this, but as tension and anxiety began to build, their agreement to let me handle it quickly disappeared…especially for my mom.

At 6:40 (Philippine Airlines subscribes to running on Filipino Time), finally opened. I went up to the counter with all of our passports and flight information and began to talk to the agent about what our options were. She mentioned that the only option available was of the rescheduled flight that was leaving the next day at 1:30 and arriving in Manila at 5:00 PM on July 14th. I asked her about our connecting flight in Manila and she told me that the earliest that they could put us on a connecting flight to Laoag was on July 16th and we would arrive in Laoag at 11:30 AM. She told me that there was a flight on July 15th to Laoag, but that this flight was overbooked.

At this point, I looked at her, smiled, and told her that the reason we were going to Laoag was for my grandmother’s funeral which was to start at 7:00 AM on July 16th and that if we weren’t going to get there until after the funeral then what was the point of us traveling there. I then told her of the flights leaving from LAX that would get us to Manila in time for us to catch our connecting flight and at that point she got her supervisor over and an additional ticket agent to assist us in getting to Laoag in time.

When her supervisor came by, she nixed the LAX flights as there wasn’t enough time to get us down there (in my opinion there was enough to get us down there as I had found a couple of flights that would have put us there at 9 PM). When I mentioned this, she then said that since it’s two different airports, they couldn’t really do anything about the LAX flights, but they would do everything for us if we could find a flight out of SFO.

As they began to search, they did find a China Air flight that would be leaving at 12:30 that night. This flight however, wouldn’t get us to Manila in time for our connecting flight (this flight had a two hour layover in Beijing while the United Flight out of LAX was direct).

At this point, my mom who was standing directly behind me the entire time forcefully chimed in. I looked back and sternly told my mom that I’ve got this and that she agreed to let me handle it. She mentioned back at how she too was a social worker and that she can be calm in these situations too. I just looked at her and shook my head no and stated, “Well, you’re not calm right.” At that she got pissed and walked off. I’ve actually never really yelled at my mom and did feel bad about the way I responded back to her…so I did apologize to her later on that evening.

After an hour with the ticketing agents, the only option left was the flight leaving the next day and the connecting flight on the 16th. I told the agent that I would talk to my family and once we came to a decision I would be back. She said that would be fine and that I could just come back up to her when we made our decision. She did book our flight and our seats prior to me leaving the counter.

When I went over to talk to my family, I mentioned that it probably wasn’t the best of ideas if my sister and I went with them, as we would miss the funeral. My mom wasn’t happy with this suggestion because if we weren’t going, it would also mean that two balakbian boxes weren’t going either.

My aunt then proposed that we could drive from Manila to Laoag…that we could hire a driver, ask my uncle’s sister if she could travel with us from Mainla to Laoag (my dad was against hiring a driver at first because he was nervous about trusting this person…but agreed once he found out that my uncle’s sister was going to be traveling with us).

Once that was agreed, I went back to the ticket agent and booked our trip. We checked in the six balakbian boxes and our luggage. Philippine Airlines put us up in a hotel for the evening and provided us with dinner that evening, breakfast and lunch the next day. Once at the hotel, we realized that we checked in our clothes and toiletries and there went the shower for that evening.

Finally at 1:30 PM on July 13th we were on our way to the Philippines.