All these flight delays and cancellations across the country that are disrupting air travel reminded me of a few bad airline trips.
Northwestern’s athletic conference offices are in the Dallas area, and its meetings are sometimes held at airport hotels.
It is usually easy to fly into Dallas and take a tram to an on-site hotel for business gatherings.
But there was a time in the 1980s when TWA had Louisiana’s state contract for air travel. That turned a scheduled trip from Shreveport to Dallas into an adventure.
Bobby Alost was president of Northwestern and planned to fly to a Southland Conference meeting.
He had an emergency and asked me to go in his place. Neither of us had flown to a league meeting since TWA took over our air travel.
It was a shock to discover at the airport that I had to fly to TWA’s St. Louis hub to get a connecting flight to Dallas.
Sleet and snow swept into St. Louis after I got there. All flights were canceled for the day.
Taxis and buses were sidetracked, and I spent the night stretched across three metal chairs in the airport before flying back to Shreveport the next day without ever getting to the meeting…
When Randy Webb was president, we were flying to Nashville for an NCAA convention. There was bad weather, and we missed our connecting flight to Nashville from Atlanta.
We were on American Airlines, which canceled all its flights to Nashville.
Delta still had a couple, but our state-rate tickets could not be changed to another airline. The Delta clerk I begged to help us made that clear.
A guy with “Supervisor” stamped on his badge heard the discussion and asked to see our tickets. He noticed that we were from Louisiana.
The supervisor asked if I knew University of New Orleans basketball coach Tim Floyd. I told him about a couple of times that I visited with Tim and also his dad Lee Floyd, who coached at Southern Mississippi.
Tim was the guy’s neighbor before Delta transferred him from New Orleans to Atlanta, and he really liked the coach.
The supervisor went to the clerk’s computer, typed some stuff in and handed us tickets on Delta’s next flight to Nashville. He said he upgraded them to First Class at no charge.
I sent Tim Floyd a thank you note for being a nice neighbor…
Regina and I flew to South Florida for our honeymoon at Marco Island 20 years ago.
On the trip back, we got stranded in Houston. The airport was closing in a storm, and travelers were being shuttled to area hotels.
We stayed around trying to get to Shreveport and were the only two people on the last shuttle to a hotel.
It was 30 miles away. There were three cars in the dark parking lot, and the front desk clerk could have been in Mafia movies.
The dim marquee advertised a motel restaurant. We had not eaten anything since snacks on the plane 12 hours earlier.
I asked about the restaurant, and the clerk said all he had was sandwiches. He gave us dry bread and some cheese and greenish ham from an old refrigerator.
Our room was musty, and the lock on the door didn’t work. We stacked luggage in front of it and napped on the suitcases.
We escaped into an airline minivan early the next morning and finally got home.
The oceanfront resort where we spent the first several days of our honeymoon was luxurious, and we might still be making monthly payments on it.
The last day that ended with us sprawled on luggage stacked by a motel door that would not lock reminded us how nightmarish airline travel can be.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES