California, here I come…..

I have never, ever, in all my years of flying, missed a flight. Ever. Sure, there have been occasions when my first flight was delayed or cancelled and I wasn’t able to make my connecting flight and had to be rebooked. Those instances however were the fault of the airline or the weather. Not mine. I, have never missed a flight…until today. Today, I missed a flight.

Before I expound on my stupidity, let me give a brief “week in review” of what’s been going on for those of you who find my schedule as confusing and difficult to keep up with as I do. I finished up my 6 weeks at the JH Ranch last Sunday and got back to Nashville at 12:30 in the morning on Monday, August 11th. I spent last week catching up with friends, doing laundry, getting paid to sit in the audience of a new Christian marriage talk show that TBN is picking up, etc. You know…normal stuff like that.
Friday night I repacked the suitcase that was lying still partially full on the floor from my previous journey. Saturday morning at the crack of dawn I drove to Spring Hill, Tennessee, met Ronnie, Kevin and Wes, drove to Mountainbrook, Alabama where I parked my car in a friend’s driveway and hopped in the car with the band for the trek to Bowdon, Georgia where we played a show last night. This morning I rode back to Birmingham and the gang dropped me off at the airport where I hopped a (miserable) flight to Atlanta…where I would stay longer than I had intended…

[Random interjection: I’m watching the in-flight tracker map on the flat screen in the back of the seat in front of me and it has struck me how curiously the United States is divided up. The Northeastern states where the 13 original colonies were are so small and then the rest of the Eastern seaboard and really anything directly South of the Great Lakes are sort of the same size and then the further West you go, the bigger the states get and you have places like Arizona and Alaska and Idaho and Montana. It’s like the further along in history we progress, the lazier we get. Our founding fathers divvied things up into nice manageable parcels of land and recently we’ve seemed to say, eh…“just lump it all in together and call it California or Texas. We’ve got better things to do than make cute, tiny states.”]

I seriously have no idea what in the world happened. I got to my new gate 45 minutes ahead of departure time. I stood with the flock of waiting passengers in line for the 6:30 pm Delta airlines flight from Atlanta, GA to San Diego, CA. I heard the gate attendant call for some flight to Buffalo, NY. I returned a phone call. I thought it was funny that the electronic standby list now had my seat number listed beside a standby passenger’s name. I watched them board the plane. I made it a specific point NOT to board the “flight to Buffalo.” I watched them lock the jet-way door. I watched the “San Diego 6:30” notation disappear from the electronic schedule. I wandered to the window to watch the flight pull away and take off. I commented to the person on the other end of the phone that “my flight is running awfully late.” I waited 10 minutes. I approached the gate agent and asked if my flight was running late. She looked at my boarding pass, gave me a blank look and informed me that the flight had taken off “about 15 minutes ago.” I protested that I thought that had been the flight to Buffalo. She looked confused. She didn’t know about any flight to Buffalo. I SWEAR they said Buffalo. I SWEAR. I HEARD them say Buffalo.

The large, bored man at customer service was NOT compassionate and did NOT think I was cute at all. I told him my story. The only words he uttered to me were “So you stood there and just watched it fly off?” Um….yeah……… He rolled his eyes. He didn’t utter any more words. He DID however, rebook me on a later flight at no extra charge. Which is where I am now…the 8:40 pm flight to San Diego seat 20B. Studying the flight tracker, blogging, and doing grad school homework. Bemoaning the fact that had I not missed my flight, I’d already be in San Diego, not still flying over random tiny towns in “Nuevo Mexico” and wondering why the “English” function on my flight tracker actually means “en Espanol.”

Buenos Noches, Amigos.