The Final Day(s)

Well, our vacation ended on a slightly bumpy note! We got up Sunday and went to mass at St. Patrick's on 5th Avenue, a beautiful old cathedral. We spent the afternoon just hanging around Times Square, lunching at a deli, and visiting the Ripley's Believe It Or Not museum and Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum. After that, it was off to the airport- and that's where the trouble began....

We got to the Newark, NJ airport at the U.S. Airways ticket counter in plenty of time, seat assignments in hand, feeling relaxed. We were sent to the gate, which seemed strangely empty - but what the heck, we were early, right? After a while, we heard some commotion a few gates down, and when I went down to look at what was going on, I discovered that the gate with the commotion was really our gate! The hubbub was that the plane had arrived, and it had been downsized. The flight was already oversold, and it created a situation where the plane was 50 people oversold! They invalidated everyone's seat assignments and had begun reassigning based on who was in the gate area, but that created problems with people who had checked in online or early (like us). Eventually they told us that they had already assigned all the seats and we were out of luck. I thought about driving but it's a long way from New Jersey to St. Louis and we were already tired. Long story short, they eventually told us that we could take an American Airlines flight leaving at 6:15 AM the next day - but it would be leaving from LaGuardia. They booked a taxi and a hotel for us and sent us on our way. It's a long way from Newark to LaGuardia, and the traffic was terrible, so it turned into a 90 minute cab ride to a - well, let's say it was not quite the same quality hotel we had been staying in all week. We had to split across two crackerbox rooms, we had no luggage, and we got just a couple hours sleep before we had to be back to the airport. They told us to get there early because they couldn't assign seats until the morning of the flight. Don't worry, they assured us, there are plenty of seats available! We got up about 3:30 AM and headed for the airport. We checked in at a kiosk, and good thing too, as we got the last 4 seats on the plane (nowhere near each other, but hey, we were on the flight). We finally got in about 7:30 AM St. Louis time, tired but happy to be home.