Travel Troubles

I had to fly out to Minneapolis for my deposition this past Sunday. I bought the tickets through a travel website at work on Friday. They weren’t very good tickets because they had a large layover, but since they were bought on such short notice I figured that I would just have to deal with it. It turned out there was more wrong with those tickets than I first thought.

I arrived at the Boston airport Sunday about an hour before my flight and walked up the United eticket kiosk. It gave me some error message about not being able to find my ticket. I went and asked the help desk what the problem was? It took her about a minute to realize my ticket said that I had United Airline tickets through American Airlines. The American Airlines part was in small print so we had both missed it. She said I needed to go to terminal B to get my tickets. I rushed over to terminal B only to find that I really needed to go to Terminal A. At Terminal A the people could only print out the first leg of my trip. They weren’t sure why the second leg wouldn’t print, but told me that I could get my next ticket once I landed it Washington and had more time. With that advice I rushed off and got on my plane a few minutes before it left.

I flew into Regan National Airport in Washington DC and stopped by a help desk to try and get my ticket printed for the flight to Minneapolis. When they said I had to go to the other airport, my jaw just about hit the floor. It turned out that while both of the airports listed on my ticket were called “Washington” I was flying into Regan National and out of Dulles. After recovering from that shock I took a 45 minute shuttle to Dulles and got on my flight. I sure didn’t expect to drive by the Washington monument when I woke up on Sunday.

The moral of this story is that I’ll be checking my flights more carefully in the future. The consolation prize was that the flight back was much easier. And that’s a good thing, because my brain felt like a pile of mush after a day long deposition. The lawyers told me not to talk about the deposition so I can’t really say much more on that topic, but I will say that it sucked. I’m just gad it’s over.