Atlanta

This week I ventured to the Atlanta area for my last work trip this year (and probably for quite awhile). I drove through Atlanta on my way from the airport to the call center and that was the extent of my "visit" to Atlanta. I did get to enjoy some awesome southern food at a cool diner. I had meatloaf that looked like it had been molded in muffin tins, a zucchini casserole, and sweet mashed potatoes. It was delicious! Unfortunately the diner was out of cobbler. :(

The big adventure of the trip was trying to get home. I left the call center a little later than I had planned and then ran into traffic just north of the airport. There was an accident involving a school bus and a car and they shut down 3 lanes of the 7 lane highway (and it caused a nice little backup). Once through that chaos I headed to drop of my rental car but had to get gas first. I had hoped there'd be a gas station near the rental car place but I couldn't find one so I had to head out to search for a gas station - fortunately my GPS came in very handy with this. I got to the rental car place, but because my car had a temporary license plate I had to go to the counter to get a receipt (very important to get reimbursed) and in the process managed to dump my purse upside-down. *SIGH* I almost left my blackberry underneath the car in the process.

So after the debacle I was definitely in a hurry to make it to the gate, since I knew I had two tram rides and a security line in my future. I checked in (at a nice little kiosk at the rental car garage) and had never felt so relieved to find out that my flight was delayed. When I arrived at the terminal I still felt the need to hurry to the gate but couldn't find my flight number on the Departures screens so I decided to just go to the gate printed on my boarding pass.

I managed through security, despite the guy behind me who pretended he was going to head to a different line and then conveniently realized, as he passed me, that his friend was standing in front of me and then cut in line without even looking at me. Grrrr. I caught the second tram to the terminal and came to find out that my flight had been canceled!

So I spent the next few hours wandering from gate to gate intently watching the standby lists to see if I'd get cleared for a flight. I was #20 on the list and there were a total of about 60 people. All of the flights were booked so it didn't look good. My co-worker and I finally decided to call our travel agent company to find out what the deal was if we had to stay overnight (we were confirmed on a 6:20 am flight the next morning). Thankfully they found out at the different airline still had seats on a 10pm flight that night. So after waiting through 2 standby lists on 2 flights we gave up and booked our flight home. Our original flight was at 5:20pm so the delay to the 10pm flight seemed like forever but at least we didn't have to spent the night at the Atlanta airport. I think I arrived home at 1:15am.

I had on my travel list to some day spend some time in Atlanta and Savannah. Right now, I have no desire to see the Atlanta airport anytime soon. Perhaps one day I'll venture back and hope for a less adventurous tour of the airport!