OK, so we didn’t exactly plan for our trip to go this way. Things just sort of suddenly spiraled into action late Monday night. I’ve been calling the whole ordeal Operation Blizzard Escape.
When Julie and I, getting ready for bed, glanced at the weather report online, our jaws dropped. “Monster Storm Approaching Northeast,” the headline at Accuweather.com screamed. “Blizzard… Whiteouts… Travel to be severely impacted.” This “February Fury,” as the Weather Channel had already christened it, would be dumping 12 to 18 inches of snow on New York City, and bringing with it punishing 50 mph winds, on the very day we were supposed to take off for our winter vacation to Mexico.
“We have terrible luck,” Julie lamented. “If we were leaving just one day earlier we would have been fine.”
She tried calling Expedia and American Airlines, but the phone lines were tied up for the two hours she waited on hold. Then the call was dropped. So here’s where Operation Blizzard Escape truly kicked in: We searched on our own and found a set of cheap tickets to Miami with Air Tran for the next morning. That flight would leave in just six hours; we’d have to leave for Laguardia airport at 4 in the morning. Why Miami? Because our original flight had a stopover in Miami anyway; we’d just pick up on the Miami-to-Cancun leg on Wednesday morning – so it would be like the blizzard never happened.
Of course, there were some formalities first – we e-mailed our bosses and let them know we wouldn’t exactly be at work on Tuesday; I had a load of midnight laundry to do; we had to sit through an hour of online glitches at the Air Tran website for web check-in; and naturally we had to pack our bags in a hurry – but on Tuesday morning (that is, yesterday morning) we landed at Miami’s airport, well ahead of the storm that was just beginning to brush against New York and Washington, D.C.
Sure enough, most flights leaving out of New York’s airports were later canceled. And all schools were suspended for the day. (Baltimore even ordered all traffic except for emergency vehicles off the city’s highways.) My boss, via e-mail, fretted that she might get stuck at work. So if we hadn’t leaped into action and gotten out of Dodge, we would have been trapped in Brooklyn, peering out the window at the drifting snow, dreaming of Mexico, guacamole, sunny skies and what could have been.
[A word of warning, if you're thinking this plan might work for you: Airlines really, really hate it if you skip one of the legs of your itinerary. They might even declare that by doing so you have invalidated your entire ticket – that's what we were told, before we talked to an American Airlines supervisor who begrudgingly “disappeared” our skipped flight. So tread carefully. This is a “last resort” option for weather emergencies; try calling first. Having said that, if we had followed official airline protocol we would most assuredly not be on this flight high above the Gulf of Mexico today.]
Last night we kicked back in our hotel in Miami. A noisy South Beach-style party raged down on the pool deck outside our window, but we did what we would have been doing at home anyway, watching another episode of the final season of “Lost” on TV. Everything was going to work out just fine.
