Croatia

[OnyxCougar]

Day Thirteen (Friday) November 7, 2002


At about 5:30am a group of freshly rested people came into the terminal and Kelle and I both woke up. She was stiff and sore from laying on the floor, and I was stiff and sore from leaning over all our stuff in an attempt to make sure it wouldn't get stolen. We got up and took turns fixing ourselves up in the bathroom, then made our way to the counter. Delta took our endorsed Austrian tickets to Vegas and put us on Standby for Salt Lake. We went past security and looked down at the fluffy carpet and the McDonalds. This would have been way better to sleep on.

Got to the gate, and quickly caught on to how standby works. They have a number of unsold seats. That is the starting number of standby tickets they will issue. Since the agent on the phone saw there was still 12 seats unsold on this flight, he was able to issue 12 SCNs (2 to us). Now. The people with the SCNs for this flight were pretty much guaranteed a seat. Now here's the true standby part. Any cancellation seats are totaled up the hour before, and more SCNs are issued. Now in the last 10 minutes prior to boarding, anyone who hasn't checked in yet pretty much loses their seat, and then all the people on the list get em. We knew as soon as we sat down at the gate our seats were ours. I finally relaxed. Once we got to SLC, I knew southwest air ran like every other hour. We were as good as home. Kelle and I talked about getting standby's once we got to SLC and I said, "hey, worse comes to worst, we'll DRIVE home. It's only about 6 hours. I WILL sleep in my own bed tonight."

We arrived in Salt Lake, and so did all our luggage. We went to baggage claim and grabbed everything, and I called Daddy to let him know we were here. He said to go check on the standby for Vegas at the Delta counter and give him a call when we knew something. So we went to the Delta counter. "Hi. We're National Refugees, and Were ticketed from JFK to Vegas. We got the standby from JFK to here, and need to now get our last leg to Vegas." The young clerk smiled. "Certainly. May I have your tickets, please?" I looked at Kelle. "They took our tickets at the Delta counter in New York when they put us on the flight here. They were endorsed my Austrian air." She blinked at me. "Here is our tickets from New York to here. See there? Standby." She looked at them. "These don't show you're ticketed through to Vegas." "Well, we were originally ticketed from JFK to Vegas on National, but since they went bankrupt, Austrian Air endorsed the tickets, and we gave them to the Delta people in New York, to get us home. They said we had to get standby into Vegas from here." She sighed and shook her head. "Well, they only ticketed you to here. You'll have to buy tickets from here to Vegas."

I sighed. "Ok, how much are two one ways from here to Vegas?" She did some typing. "$153 each." I looked at Kelle. "We don't have that kind of money. Is that the standby price?" The lady nodded. Looks like we're driving home. I mean, $35 + gas for a one day car rental was alot better than $300 + tax. So we got out of line and I started calling car rental places. Well, all I had was a debit card. Not a credit card. Just FYI, car rental companies will NOT rent to you if all you have is a debit card. You can have a million dollars on a debit car, but they won't rent to you. Not even if you put $200 cash on the counter. I called every car rental company in Salt Lake City. Nothing.

"Daddy?"
"What you got?" he said, confidently.
"A bunch of nothin." I explained the whole Delta thing and the whole car thing.
"ok, you're at the airport now?"
"Yeah."
"You're at a pay phone?"
"Yeah."
"ok, give me your phone number there." I did. "Ok, stay where you are, camp on that phone, and I'll call you back in 30 minutes.
"ok Daddy."

Thirty minutes later he called back. "You have a pen?"
"yeah."
"ok, write this down." He gave me some digits. "Take that number to the Southwest counter right now. Run to the counter. Your flight leaves in 45 minutes." I squealed and relayed the information to Kelle. She squealed and we hugged each other. I hung up the phone and we literally ran to the southwest counter. I gave them the confirmation number and we checked in. Surprise! Our bags, being international, were "randomly selected" for full search. We had to give them our keys, and they unlocked everything, unpacked everything, then tried to repack everything and were having a hard time. Minutes were ticking by and we were required to stand there, but we couldn't help repack. They simply couldn't stuff all that shit into the bags that we had been schlepping around the planet. They had to call someone over to make everything fit. Finally, they got it all zipped up, locked up, handed out keys back, and checked our bags through. We went past security as quickly as possible, and got to the gate after almost everyone had boarded. Got to the ticket guy on the ramp, and had to take our shoes off. Shoes came off, fanny packs and backpacks were completely gone through and we ran up the jetway.

It was a pleasant flight home, we were exhausted and smelled, but we were nearly there. We landed in Vegas 50 minutes later and I nearly bent to my knees and kissed McCarren. We called Sindy, she came and picked us up. Got home, called Daddy, thanked him again, got in the shower, and went to bed. We were home.

The End