Several have ask that I tell the rest of the story regarding our return trip home! So here goes the last post for this trip.
Houston, TX is a large international airport, with many people from Southern Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America entering the United States in Houston. When we got off our plane and entered Immigration, it looked like there might be 1000 to 1500 in line to be processed. It was Easter Sunday, and there were very few Immigration Officers working at the windows.
The last time I went through Immigration, one of the workers told my wife and I that soon, Immigration would be done at self-service kiosks and would be much faster. Here in Houston, there were approximately 30 of these machines set up for beta testing. You had to use the new machine, but you also needed to see an Immigration Officer. The four students who were on the trip without an accompanying parent were going through immigration with me. I had paper work that said I was their guardian.
Parker walked up to the new machine. It scanned his passport, took his photograph, and spit out a receipt with pertinent information and his photograph. He moved into the incredibly long line to see the Immigration Officer. Kara and Jake each stepped up to a machine, and both had problems. Kara's machine refused to scan her passport. While she was repeating the process several times, Jake was having troubles with the machine he was using as well. After several attempts to get the machine to take him through the process, Jakes machine finally froze on a particular screen and refused to budge.
Everyone is new at using these machines. There is a person at the entrance to the kiosks who is a little frustrated at citizens who don't seem to know how to read, or to follow directions. So when I told her that Jakes machine had frozen up, I got the look of "I have to deal with another moron" . . . which may have been true! But, she finally sucummed to my motion for help, and discovered that I was not a moron and the machine had quit working. She told Jake to find a new machine while she rebooted the stubborn kiosk. Meanwhile, Kara found a machine that would scan her passport and she got her receipt. She stayed with the group. Jake is still having trouble, and Tyler is also having trouble with the machines. Afer what seemed like an eternity, Jake and Tylers receipts finally printed out, and they looked just like Kara's and mine, with the exception that their receipts had a big black X through their photos!! We would soon find out that there was significance to the black X.
As the four of us departed the kiosk area, we had to show our receipts to a line monitor. Jake and Tyler were told to hang a left from the monitors position, which was consistent with all people who had a black X through their photo on the receipt. It was clear that the black X indicated you were a problem child and needed special attention! I didn't want to be separated as a group, but decided to go where they told Kara and I to go . . . . to the "Good Guys" line, and then wait for Tyler and Jake to get through the line.
The crowd was so large that when Kara and I got through immigration, I couldn't see Jake and Tyler. After looking around for a little while, I decided they must have gone downstairs to get their luggage to go through customs. So, we headed down to baggage claim and found our bags, but no Jake and Tyler. A phone call to Jake revealed that he and Tyler were still standing in line and they had a long way to go before they would reach the Immigration Officer.
By this time, people from our group were calling us from their seat on the plane!! They first indicated that the plane door would close in 11 minutes. Tyler and Jake were still in immigration. But soon, Jake called and said he and Tyler had made it through immigration and were heading down to find their bags. The customs line was 10 or 15 minutes. Tyler and Jake were in line. Kara and I were looking for them to get through Customs. We still could't see them yet. We got a call from the plane that the door closed in 4 minutes. After about five minutes, Jake and Tyler were coming through customs! They dropped their bags off at baggage security and started to run upstairs to the plane gate. There were so many people on the escalator that they ran up the steps. I remember saying out loud . . . I can't take the steps. But I did take the steps, trying to keep up with students 45 years my junior. But at the top of the stairs, around the corner, was another security line, and it was not short. The phone was quiet. No calls from the plane. After we got out of security, I told the kids to run as fast as they could to the gate. I knew if they got on, they would wait for me!
Everyone took off running. Most of us were carrying our shoes as there was no time to put them on. The gate was so close that the kids ran past it! As they turned around, the empty seats in the gate area and the empty ticket agent podium told the whole story. The plane was gone.
Jake shared with us that it was on his bucket list to run through an airport and just barely catch his flight. Well, we didn't catch the flight, but it was close enough for Jake to cross it off his list!!
Our next stop was the United Customer Care Center. There we got to see the ugly parts of humanity, as witnessed one woman chastise her husband for being so stupid as to book a flight with so little time to make it through immigration. I think he was taking the right approach by saying very few words! Another lady was giving the ticked agent the business because there was not another flight until morning. Seeing that those two approaches yielded nothing that seemed positive, we decided to take the "lets just see what the next best move we can make will be" attitude. While that attitude was a whole lot better on us and the ticked agents, it didn't really produce any different results!
The agent told us there was a flight leaving in an hour to San Francisco, but it was completely booked. He told us that he could almost guarantee us that we would not get on that flight, but we told him to put us on standby anyway, as we had nothing to loose.
When we got to the gate, it was apparent that we were the 10th through the 13th standby passengers waiting for a seat, and a woman and her two daughters showed up after us!! 16 people waiting for a standby seat on a sold out plane!
The kids were hungry. It was about 9:45 in the evening, and they hadn't purchased much of a lunch in the Montego Bay airport! They wanted to just forget the standby flight and get something to eat, but I told them we needed to play this option out before we went to eat.
As the plane filled, much to my surprise, they started calling some standby passengers! There were seats on the plane! And before they were through, they gave each of us sixteen standby passengers a boarding pass! We all headed down the jetway and on to the plane. I went to find my seat when I discovered another person sitting in my seat. I knew we were in trouble when that person produced a boarding pass with the same seat number as I had! Kara, Tyler, and Jake were having the same problem! So, the attendant told us to wait at the rear of the plane. After five minutes of shuffling passengers, it was clear that there were more passengers on the plane than there were seats! Soon, we could see the mom and the two girls being asked to get back off the plane! Then the counting began. First one attendant, then another. One of them came back and told me that there were only three open seats on the plane. He wasn't sure what to do. I told him that the solution was obvious. We had to fly together and we needed four seats. They didn't have four seats. The only logical thing to do was to kick us off the plane and seat the mom and the two daughters back on the plane. The attendants were relieved that there was not a yelling incident. The mom and daughters were delighted that they could go home after all, and we were no worse off than when we tried to fly standby on a full plane.
After we de-planed and everything settled down, I talked to the ticket agent about our reservation for the morning flight. She said that since it was less than 24 she could just print out boarding passes right then, and that would make our morning go a little easier. The morning flight was scheduled to board at 6:25 a.m.
The only thing on the kids mind now was food! As we left the gate and headed to the food courtyard, it was quite evident that the food operations closed at 10, and it was now 10:15. So, we made arrangements for a hotel with a shuttle service that would pick us up. When we drove up to the hotel, Jake noted that his favorite restaurant, Taco Bell, was just a block away! So, we checked into our rooms, and met in the lobby to embark on our search for food! We walked briskly towards the neon bell, only to discover that the restaurant was closed. Only the drive up window was open. And, as some of you know, they will not serve walkups at a drive up window. Taco Bell is out!
So, no problem. We had walked across the Carl's Jr. restaurant to get to Taco Bell. But as we returned to Carl's, it was apparent that none of us had realized that Carl's was closed at 10 as well! We had also passed by a gas station that had a mini-mart and a little restaurant called the Chicken Basket. Now, not to any surprise, the Chicken Basket had not been open all day because it was Easter!
It is interesting how good those pre-made sandwiches in the refrigerator look when you haven't eaten for eleven hours! We all grabbed our favorite sandwich, a bag of chips, a drink, and an ice cream Drum Stick! After moving things around the room a bit, we were able to set up dinner in my hotel room, where we ate, laughed, and thought back about our adventurous day!
It was about midnight when we finished dinner. Time to get to bed. It turned out that that the hotel shuttle left on the hour for the airport. Trying to do the math in my head as quickly as possible, I realized that we could not take the 6 a.m. shuttle, because 25 minutes was not enough time to assure a prompt arrival at the departure gate. So we had to be on the 5 a.m. shuttle! That meant we all needed a wake up call at 4:45 a.m. So the sleep in the night just felt like a blink. I was in the hallway at 5 minutes to 5. In a minute, Kara came out of her room, ready to go. I had her knock on Jake and Tylers room, but there was no answer. I thought maybe they had already gone downstairs. But Kara said she could hear voices. On closer inspection, it looked like the boys never closed their door tight when they went to bed. I pushed it open to see the TV running, and both of them sound asleep!!! I told them to get out of bed and that they had three minutes to be downstairs. I left to make sure the shuttle bus held up for a few minutes so they could get on the shuttle. But, in three minutes, they were both down in the lobby getting on the bus! Great come back boys!
With the early shuttle ride, we had time for a little breakfast at the airport and then onto our gate. We were in boarding group 4, so most everyone was on the plane. When they called our group and Kara finally got to the person scanning boarding passes, hers made a distinctive loud beep! A loud beep is never good. After three tries, she told Kara to step to the side, and the performance was repeated with Tyler and Jake. She asked me if I was with those three. It was sort of the kiss of death. I admitted to being with them, and sure enough, I got the loud beep treatment as well. We all stepped aside. Everyone else boarded the plane. We were in familiar territory now! It turned out that when we were boarded on the standby flight the night before, our reservation got canceled for the morning flight. When we got kicked off that flight, no one bothered to reschedule us for the morning flight again! God was looking out after us . . . there were enough empty seats on the plane that they could still put us on the flight!
I think Jake summed it up best when he said, "I think we have just about experienced everything that could go wrong at an airport!"
The rest is history. We had an uneventful drive home with the exception of the long dreamed of food stop at Taco Bell!
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