Late last night, David and I returned from our third trip to New Jersey in the last year. My grandparents live there, so we went for Passover last April, then for my cousin's engagement party in July, and then again for the first night of Passover this year. My mom and aunt met us out there, and we had a wonderful time with them, and with my grandparents, and with my cousin who lives in Brooklyn. We mostly just hung out and prepared for the Seder and ate a lot, but we also had a day of rainy sightseeing, the highlights of which were Coney Island and the Brooklyn Museum. My mom and I played a flute concert for my grandparents and David and I managed to wheedle a few stories out of them.
It was a fantastic trip until we got the dreaded robo-call from Delta yeasterday morning, telling us that our flight home had been cancelled. We were supposed to have been on the same flight back as my aunt at 12:35, but she got bumped to the 4:20 Detroit flight and we were routed through Atlanta. When I called Delta to see if we could get on the 4:20 with my aunt, I was informed that Atlanta flight had been canceled as well and we were now on the 6:30 to Detroit. There were no more seats on the 4:20, and I declined her cheerful offer to put my aunt on the 6:30 so we could all go together. We had originally planned our flight to coordinate with my mom's return to Los Angeles, so we still had to return the rental car and get to the airport in time for her flight, which hadn't been canceled because she wasn't on Delta. So we settled in for a long afternoon at the airport. We tried to get on the standby list for my aunt's flight, but it was so oversold that they weren't even taking names. She finally got off the ground about forty minutes behind schedule, and then David and I sat and watched as our flight got delayed again and again. He was convinced until the moment we took off that we weren't going to get back to Detroit, but after a long sit on the runway we were in the air shortly after 9pm and home about eight hours later than we had planned. If we had left in a car when our original flight was supposed to have taken off, we would have been home sooner. One might blame it on the weather or just accept that things like this happen once in a while, except that we had a very similar experience the last time we tried to come home from Newark, and the weather then was perfectly clear. I never thought I would be nostalgic for Northwest Airlines, but it definitely seems that service has gotten worse since Delta took over.
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