Yeah, so getting to Charlottesville was definitely an adventure...
So about 9 hours before my flight, US Airways calls and tells me that my flight from Phoenix to DC has been cancelled. They offer to put me on the next flight out to DC, which of course gets there way late at night when I won't be able to catch my train to Charlottesville. After some juggling, we figure that there's a flight that gets into Baltimore, and then I can take Amtrak down from Baltimore to DC, and then from DC to Charlottesville. The problem is that I'd only have about 45 mins from when the plane lands to catch the train. But with no other options, I decide to give it a shot.
Here's my plane in the wee hours of the morning in Oakland.
Everything's going fine until I get onto my plane at Phoenix. First it can't leave the gate because the maintenance guys are doing some checks. And then it has to wait for the paperwork about those checks to get completed. We finally taxi out to the runway, and then the pilot discovers some sort of computer glitch with the brakes. So we have to taxi back to the gate. The mechanics figure out it's some button next to the landing gear that needed to be pushed. Then we have to wait for the paperwork to be filled out again. And the plane needs to be refeuled. The plane basically leaves about 2 hours late. So much for making my train.
Anyways, I was talking to some of the other passengers, and they said there is a shuttle service that runs from Baltimore to DC that I could take instead of my missed train. So when we land I find the shuttle service and ask them how long it takes for them to get to DC. They say, "Half-hour or less". It's 5:58 and my train leaves at 6:30. They said no way am I gonna make it.
So I end up staying at a motel next to the airport.
(Felicity later pointed out to me that Amtrak is always late. Especially with the weather, it's likely that the train was delayed maybe an hour or so. So I might have been able to make it. Oh well....)
Here it is snowing at my motel. And my foggy breath.
So we reschedule my Amtrak reservations to get from Baltimore to DC, and then take the bus from DC down to Charlottesville. Of course, the train leaving Baltimore gets delayed over an hour, so I'm now in danger of missing my bus. I arrive at DC Union Station with fifteen minutes before the bus leaves. I ask one of the Amtrak conductors where the busses are, and he tells me I have to go out onto 1st St. and walk three blocks to get to the Greyhoud station. Well, that's just great.
So by the time I get to the Greyhound station, I'm five minutes late, and I have no idea whether my bus has left or not. Turns out that 1) The bus leaves the Greyhound station, but it actually makes a stop at Union Station which is where I should have stayed and gotten on, and 2) the transportation department has shut down all the busses and no bus has moved all day.
OK, so I trudge on back to Union Station (in the snow, uphill, carrying my luggage....hahaha), and try to change my ticket from the bus to the train that goes from DC to Charlottesville. Of course, all this trudging back and forth and waiting in information lines means that the train I want to take has already left, and I have to wait 8 more hours for the next train. Or I would have had to wait, if the train I wanted to take was on schedule. It was not. It was running an hour and forty minutes late. But it was funny because the ticket booth wouldn't give me a ticket for the train because according to their system, I had already missed the train by half an hour. Once I pointed out to them that the train was insanely late though, then I had no problems.
So I sit down to wait the hour, and as soon as I sit down, they announce that there's a problem with some of the switching lines in Pennsylvania or something and then the train promptly gets delayed another 50 minutes. But the train finally arrives, and I finally get to Charlottesville, 21 hours after I had originally planned to. Wheeeee!
