This isn’t my usual kind of post here at ITBTK. Over the past weekend, I attended Stitches East in Hartford, CT. It was a great experience, and I’m going to do a few posts to tell you about some of the really amazing vendors I saw there and new friends I made.
Before all that though, I thought I’d entertain you with the adventure I had in getting there and back to have this experience in the first place. Since I don’t have an unlimited source of funds for these conventions, I thought I’d save a few dollars by booking my flights myself. I have a regular agent that I use, but she was unavailable anyway, so I thought I’d do it myself. I’ve done it in the past and it isn’t really rocket science, is it?
So I googled cheap flights from Vancouver to Hartford and then went to compare the different prices from all the major travel networks out there – I didn’t realize how many there were! Anyway, you can imagine that I’m staring at my computer screen with multiple tabs open looking for the cheapest flight to fit my needs. I have a 24″ iMac, so that’s a lot of screens!
Somehow, my eyes see this amazing deal at $300 less than all the others, with great travel times. Yes, it left at 6:25am, but it arrived at 4:30 pm on the Thursday. Again, it was leaving on the return leg at 6:35 am, but it would get back to Vancouver at 12:30 pm on Monday, early enough for me to salvage a Thanksgiving dinner! I hastily book the flight and thought nothing of it after that!
Thursday afternoon, I check in at the airport and board my flight. I’m whisked away to O’Hare in Chicago, the first leg of the flight. I didn’t have any checked baggage, so I wasn’t worried about making the connecting flight with only 40 minutes between. If you’ve ever been to O’Hare, you’ll know it’s one of the busiest and largest airports in the US. I had to make my way across the airport to get to the gate for my connecting flight. When I got there they had started boarding, but I still had time.
Can you believe that in all this time, I hadn’t checked/noticed that my connecting flight was to Charlotte, NC on my boarding pass??!!! I never realized it and it wasn’t until the attendant scanned it that it was brought to my attention that I wasn’t going to Hartford! They couldn’t even change the flight as the flight that was leaving for Hartford at that gate, was full!!
My only option was to make my way back to a gate across the airport (where I had just come from) and go to Charlotte. I made this one just in time, literally with 3 minutes to spare. Again, because they were so close to finishing the boarding, there was nothing they could do to make any changes. Off to Charlotte I go!
So I arrived in Charlotte at 4:30 pm while I should have been in Hartford at the same time. 🙁
Now I had to find a way to Hartford, asap. The train left at 1:00 am and took 6 hours, and was my first option. It was full. Flights weren’t leaving until the next day as well but were too expensive (remember, very small budget), and didn’t return when I needed them to. I still had to think about making my return flight home from Charlotte at 6:35 am on Monday! So I had to take a Greyhound bus, leaving in 90 minutes, for 16 hours to get to Hartford!
Once there I went straight to Stitches and did my best to not worry about how I would get home.
Over the course of the event, I ended up booking a flight from Hartford to Charlotte on Sunday evening – this was the cheapest and easiest way to get back to Charlotte in time for my flight Monday morning. Sunday afternoon, when I left for the airport, I had to take a $45 cab to get there, as the next regular transit bus wasn’t leaving for the airport until 6:30pm. My flight was scheduled to leave at 6:40 pm. 🙁 Thanks to the generosity of a good friend, I was able to get the cab and make it there!
No sooner do I check in than I find out the flight is delayed 30 minutes. Apparently there was a bombing in Chicago 3 weeks ago that destroyed some ground radar equipment. It still wasn’t fixed and flights were being delayed and cancelled all over the place. 30 minutes turned into more than 2 hours by the time it was all said and done, and it turned out that I could have saved myself the expensive cab fare after all!
Then, to add insult to injury, the flight out of Hartford to Chicago was delayed for so long, that there was no way to make my connecting flight to Charlotte!! I’ll spare you the details of the next 30 minutes of me trying to explain to the lady at Customer Service that I had to get home Monday, but let me just say that I don’t think she knows how to spell Customer Service, let alone provide it. Let’s just say that in the end I suggested she check for flights leaving Chicago in the morning and going to Vancouver. She ended up finding one that left Chicago and connected with my original return flight in Dallas. So I spent the 8 hours in between flights in O’Hare and made my way home at the same time I had originally planned.
So you must be asking what I have to be thankful about with this wacky adventure! Well, quite a few things …
- I did manage to get to Stitches and experience Stitches East, which I hadn’t done before!
- I met some great people and made a bunch of new friends who I can’t wait to work with and see again!
- I got to see a bit of Charlotte, NC, and Virginia (in the dark), and even had a brief moment in NY.
- I arrived back home safely, a little tattered and tired, but still safely on Canadian soil!
- I still had time to roast a chicken to celebrate Thanksgiving here in Canada!
I have to send a special shout out to Lisa and Susan, you know who you are, without whom I wouldn’t be writing this post from the comfort of my chair in Vancouver, BC!
So while it wasn’t the greatest trip ever, it could have been much, much, worse! Wish me luck on getting to Chicago in 2 weeks for Vogue Knitting live!
Hugzzz 😎
