On the road again...

So this week I was officially launched into my new role as regional sales manager and am currently on my first trip for the year. Never mind that we found out last minute that we needed to be in Little Rock this week (like last Friday) but it never fails as we had an extra passenger. Yes, Murphy decided to grace us with his presence this week.

Our flight left beautiful Southern California at 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday. We were scheduled to have a brief visit, albeit 34 minutes, in Houston and then on to Little Rock. We left OC on time, but somewhere in the take-off the Houston terminal informed the pilots that our flight was rescheduled to land at 2:20 p.m. not 2:10 p.m. (now if you are paying attention this means 24 minutes to get to the next gate/flight!) So we finally land in Houston which is very cloudy, raining, etc. We landed early and arrived at 2:00 p.m. so now we are back up to 44 minute window. I can work with this. I knew we had to change terminals and this would be sufficient time to get to the connecting flight. Anyway during our actually landing there was this terrible screeching sound around the tires/brakes and about 100 yards from the gate our plane died. Yep, died! Here is where we got the first hint that things may not so well after all. We waited for 15 minutes on the tarmac for the electric carts to hook up to the plane and tow us the rest of the way in. The it took awhile to unload from the plane. I was off the plane first, so I headed to nearest counter to confirm our gate assignment and directions to the tram/shuttle to other terminals. By the time Mike was off the plane it was 2:24 p.m. (our connecting flight started boarding at 2:12 for a 2:47 departure). So we were off and running. Never mind that the drop-off point for the new terminal is the farthest place for the gate we needed, we hustled and got to the gate. The only problem, it was for a Guadalajara flight. Now we were in a pickle. We are looking all over for our gate. The screens are showing we are in the right place and the flight is on-time. So Mike, my co-worker steps up to the next gate over and asks the gentleman about our flight and was simply informed it had been cancelled. Hmmmm!!! (Why couldn't the lady that confirmed our gate assignment have shared this information??)

Long story short...Murphy was lonely and wanted to travel with us!!! We were delayed in Houston-Bush International Airport until 9:15 p.m. and didn't arrive in Little Rock until 10:30 p.m. only to discover that Mike's suitcase wasn't on our flight. Luckily it arrived on an earlier flight but never mind the poor customer service that we received from Continental who made us wait at the counter for 40 minutes before anyone came to help us. Some excuse about setting a plane up for flight tomorrow...who knows. We arrived at the Hotel and were checked in by 11:30 p.m. (I will pass over the fact that for the last 20 minutes of the flight,I was actually sick!)

Don't you just love traveling???