My trip to Norfolk, VA

So this is a trip with 2 totally different parts to it.  Let's start off with the good part.  I was in Norfolk, VA for the Mid-Atlantic Region Leadership Conference.  It was another great trip with volunteers that I enjoy working with.  The first night we went to former Detroit Lion Roger Brown's restaurant.  The food was great and of course my table ended up being the "rowdy" table.  We were having a blast talking and laughing.  One of the great things is that Roger Brown himself came out a few times to check on us, make sure that we were enjoying our time and food, and eve signed autographs.  I have to say that's how you take care of your customers.  After that a few of us went up the street to a German Beer Garden and visited for a while.  Our walk back to the hotel was interesting as it was about 1/4 of a mile away and was a complete down pour.  Not to mention none of us had umbrellas.  I'm just thankful that no one had a camera at that point!

The next day we wrapped up our program.  In the evening a few of us went across the river to enjoy the festivities of Harbor Fest.  We had dinner at a great little Irish pub called O'Malley's.  After that we went through and saw some of the sites.  From there we went back to our hotel to watch the evening fireworks.  Based on our luck the rain came in about 5 minutes before they were to start and they ended up cancelling them.  All in all the actual time in Norfolk was great.

Now for the other part of the trip.  As a disclaimer, I'm probably going to do a bit of complaining here.  If you aren't interested in this part then feel free to skip over it and look at a few of the pictures from the trip.  Here we go.  In a nut shell I was not meant to do any type of traveling for this trip.  Of course Kansas City doesn't have flights that directly fly anywhere unless that airport is a hub.  I'm used to this and have accepted that fact.  With this trip I had to fly through Chicago to get to Norfolk.  My outbound flight was scheduled to take off at 6:45 am.  We boarded and then proceeded to spend an hour on sitting on the plan due to weather delays in Chicago.  We were then cleared to take off and proceeded out to the runway.  Once we got there we quickly got back off and drove to the other side of the airport.  We were told that we were delayed again due to another round of weather in Chicago.  From there we sat for an hour and a half.  We were finally told that they were rescheduling departures to Chicago but we would be another 2 hours so they were going to let us de-board.  We finally ended up leaving Kansas City at 10:30 am.  Due to all of these issues we were stranded in Chicago for 7 hours.  We finally ended up in Norfolk at 11 pm when we were originally scheduled to arrive at 1 pm.  This turned out to be an 19 hour travel day.

So I didn't think it could get worse than that but the return trip proved me wrong.  Due to policy that there has to be 12 hours of rest for a flight crew before their next flight (something I'm perfectly okay with by the way) our 7 am flight was delayed till 9:30 causing us to miss our connection in Chicago.  We were booked on another flight to Chicago but what they didn't tell us was that our connecting flight was re booked for the following day.  While I love Chicago I was ready to go home and spending an evening there was not in my plans.  So from there I was re booked on a flight to DC and then Kansas City.  This took lots of discussion with United Airlines Customer Service (which is completely horrible).  When checking in to my flight that was now on US Air I ended up with them not being able to check me in.  I went back and forth between the two check in counters, which were at opposite ends of the airport, to get this straightened out.  It appears that one airline was using my middle initial and the other wasn't and caused the issue. I ended up missing that flight and short of having a complete melt down I was re booked on a flight to Newark, 3 hour layover, and then to Kansas City.  That flight I made and spent time walking all over Newark as I couldn't stand to sit down.  Got on that plane and had a weather delay again and they kept us there for 2 hours.  We finally took off and 30 minutes into the 3 hour flight the air conditioning quit working.  That day turned into a 15 hour travel day.  I was SO happy to be home.

To sum it up the travel was complete hell.  I've had delayes before and dealt with issues but nothing like this.  There were so many bad customer service issues with United that I did send a complaint which I don't normally do.  They did responde after 10 days appologizing for everything I went through and giving me 3000 miles.  Anyway that is past me and hopefully I never have those troubles again.

Here are a few pictures from that trip.

My view of Chicago from the airport.

View of Norfolk from my hotel room.

The rowdy table!



the irish pub.