Poking the bear

So a couple of days ago, before everything went skidding off the rails, I promised a picture of the bear we saw on the way out of Allenspark. Here you go:



Ok, I kid. Here's the real picture:



He caused no shortage of excitement, since we were on the way to the kennel with Jackson and Sydney in the back of the car. They wanted to play.

To some extent I feel like this bear - only if the bear were being poked with a sharp stick by AA. The metaphor fails, of course, because if you did poke the bear with a sharp stick it would simply maul you (and you'd learn not to do it again).

After the last post, we actually got a plane to show up. Unfortunately it was only there to taunt us. First they were cleaning it, then they were waiting on an extra pilot, and finally around 10 pm they canceled the flight outright.

No explanation, no warning, and of course no other options.

They told us to line up and that they would rebook us and give us hotel vouchers, and then followed that up with a display of gross incompetence.

Thankfully Jen was able to get through to American on her cell phone by getting their number off of the internet. Although the people working the desk repeatedly told us to call to rebook (to avoid the line), they neglected to give out the number.

Having rushed to get in line, I expected to be one of the first to get a voucher. After an hour+ of waiting, I hadn't moved. Then, I looked behind me to find out that they sent people from the back of the line to another gate, where they were taken care of. Essentially the people in the middle of the line (i.e., me) got hosed.

Finally we gave up in frustration and I booked a room at the Hilton - at the rate American was going it would have been another 3 hours, and we needed to sleep.

At the hotel I spent about 2 hours trying to decipher the itinerary that Jen put together, and was left feeling like the unfrozen caveman lawyer:



I tried to call AA to see if they could help straighten out the connection with the RTW tickets which are on BA (ostensibly part of the OneWorld alliance), but to their credit they told me up front they couldn't help me.

We slept, got up this morning and went to the airport, where Jen was able to get in touch with BA, and rearrange at least enough of the itinerary to get us to Dar es Salaam. Hopefully we'll be able to work stuff out with the remaining airlines and the trekking company.

I'm going to stop talking about AA after this post - it's probably not interesting and doesn't help my frame of mind. Maybe after a little while I'll try to put together a lessons learned - although that would require us to learn lessons.