On our recent trip to the Midwest, we heard that phrase only three times as we sat on the tarmac for three hours waiting to take off from the Baltimore airport. But let’s start at the beginning. We arrived for our 8 am flight a little early giving us some time to grab a few donuts and orange juice from the lovely Dunkin Donuts in the airport terminal. As we were enjoying that healthy breakfast, they announced that our flight would be delayed by about 45 minutes due to weather in Baltimore. They even pulled up the radar to show everyone just exactly what was happening in that part of the country. So we wait the 45 minutes and we board our family of 5 onto the airplane for our quick flight to Baltimore. As we are getting ready to leave, they assure everyone that our connections in Baltimore are also delayed and no one should have any problems catching their next flight. So the plane backs up and starts moving towards the runway and keeps going making a complete circle and bringing us right back to the gate. The captain announced, “sorry about that folks, but we had a passenger that had an anxiety attack and we decided to let him off the plane rather than have the anxiety attack escalate in the air. We should be on our way momentarily.” With that, we sat for another ten minutes when the captain comes on and says, “sorry folks, but due to the delay we have run into additional weather in our area and will have to wait about 30 minutes to clear. We are continuing to monitor your connections and everyone should be OK catching their connections in Baltimore.” After about 25 minutes, we pushed away from the gate and finally took off on our way to Baltimore. We arrived in Baltimore about 12:15 pm which was about 30 minutes after our flight to the midwest was supposed to take off. And low and behold that flight was exactly on time and had left promptly at 11:45pm without delay. Since we missed that one, we were able to catch the next flight to our destination which was scheduled to leave at 4:15pm which gave us a lot of time to really get to know the Baltimore airport. So during our 4 hour layover in Baltimore, we ate lunch, played games, watched airplanes and people. We made shapes out of pipe cleaners, colored in coloring books and the kids played their Nintendo DS games. We headed down to the gate and boarded the plane which was on time. We pushed back from the gate, pulled up into what I like to call a parking lot of planes and sat there waiting for take off. The captain comes on, “Hi folks, this is your captain and we are going to holding here for a little bit while the storms on the western corridor come through. You can use your cell phones so if you want to call ahead to people, it will be about an hour and a half.” With that he clicked off and a big murmur went through the plane discussing whether he meant we would be sitting there for an hour and a half or whether we would be arriving an hour and a half from when we actually left. The flight attendent then comes on and said, “What he meant to say is that the flight will be an hour and a half once we take off. We don’t know how long it will be until we take off, it could be 5 minutes, 30 minutes, we just don’t know.” So we sat, and we sat and we sat, and we sat. At the hour and a half mark, the captain comes back on and says, “hi folks, we have some more bad news. Some planes are starting to take off, but we haven’t been given a time from the tower as to when we will be leaving. Right now the western corridor is still closed so we are just going to have to wait until we get more information.” Meanwhile our kids are being so good, the flight attendents are playing games with the whole plane, handing out every available snack and drink that they have and constantly reassuring passengers who were asking the same questions over and over again. After about an hour the captain come on to say, “We are getting a lot of questions about why we don’t just head back to the gate to wait and then try when the weather clears. If we do that, we will lose our place in line and it will take even longer to get out of here. So we will just have to wait it out and hope they clear us to take off as soon as possible. So we continued to sit and sit and sit for another hour when the captain comes back on to say, “hi folks, we have given it our best college try to get out of here. So we are going to head back to the gate, you can get off, get something to eat, use the bathroom, stretch your legs and then we will get back on and try again.”
So with that we head back to the gate after three hours of sitting in that cramped airplane on the tarmac, we all got off, went to the bathroom and stood in line at Subway that was about 20 people deep all from our airplane. After about 5 minutes where I think about 3 people actually got their sandwiches, an announcement comes on saying that we all need to get back on board right away. At this point it is about 8 pm, our kids have had nothing substantial to eat or drink since lunch, but we got out of line at Subway and climbed back on board that airplane where we sat again for 20 minutes while they tried to round everyone up at various restaurants inside the airport. At the 20 minute mark, we were waiting for 3 people to get back on board while the flight attendents try to assess whether these people were still planning on taking this flight. Eventually they got back on with their take out bag of food, which only made it worse for all of us who weren’t as fortunate to have actually gotten food on the 15 minute “break” at the airport. It was actually kind of funny when these three people got on board because the whole plane booed and people yelled out “you better have brought enough for everyone”. With that we pushed back and were cleared for take off, getting into our destination 10 hours after we were originally scheduled to land. It was definitely the most memorable trip we have ever taken. I have to say that my children were incredible. We did not have one meltdown or hysterical fit during our entire trip out there and they kept each other thoroughly entertained during our 4 hour layover and 3 hour wait on the tarmac. They deserve a gold medal for their behavior and got a ton of compliments about how awesome they were throughout the whole ordeal. I am extremely proud of them and ourselves for having such great kids. I also would like to give a shout out to Southwest Airlines and the flight attendants on the flight out of Baltimore who were so nice and helpful and who I believe kept our airplane from totally going insane. Everyone was really calm and I chalk that up to the flight attendants who kept everyone in good spirits. I also want to say that we received vouchers from Southwest Airlines for use towards a future Southwest flight that I totally was not expecting. I didn’t think they would do anything since it was weather related, but they did and I truly appreciate the vouchers. I don’t think other airlines would have done the same thing. Luckily our return trip was without delay and we arrived back at our regularly scheduled arrival time. Thank Goodness!
