How to Spend 12 Hours in an Airport Without Losing Your Mind (and other myths)

I love my flight benefits. It's great to be able to hop on a flight and go anywhere I want, whenever I want - that is, when it works. Every now and then a trip evolves into a nightmare. We were supposed to return home from Austin on Friday. I looked at the flight loads and decided it would be better to wait until Saturday when the flights had several open seats and it looked like we would for sure make it. Turns out we would have made it on Friday. I hate it when that happens.

We got up a little before 5 a.m. and started the drive from Austin to Houston. We had to drive because on the way to Austin, we got bumped in Houston. We ended up renting a car and driving the rest of the way. It was cheaper to keep the car all week and drive it back to Houston rather than drop it off in Austin. We got to the Houston airport around 9 a.m. for our 10:20 a.m. departure.

As fate would have it, a heavy fog rolled in Saturday morning, covering a huge hunk of Texas, including everything between Austin and the Houston Intercontinental Airport (making the drive a little scary). Thanks to the new rule that fines airlines if they spend too much time on the tarmac, airlines now just cancel flights to avoid the fines. (As for me, I'd rather sit on the runway for a couple of hours and get where I'm trying to go rather than have my flight cancelled altogether. I agree there have been some extreme cases that were handled incorrectly, but the legislation has created more problems rather than addressing a few isolated incidents.) Our flight was cancelled. The next flight wasn't until a little after 3 p.m. Sigh.

So what to do ...

We exited back through security and headed downstairs in Terminal B.

Terminal B has an open area downstairs by baggage claim that is usually empty since it's basically just a big hallway. It's filled with beautiful mosaics and is open and light. It was a great place for the kids to be noisy and able to  move around without bothering anyone.

Daddy and Baylie played a few rounds of princess slap jack.

Baylie kissed a frog.

We made our voices echo under the domed ceiling.

There is a little tram that runs around the entire airport. Now that there is a monorail connecting the terminals, few people use the tram. I would hazard a guess that most passengers don't even know it's there. (The tram runs outside of security and the monorail runs inside security.) We rode it around for awhile, pretending we were on a Disney ride.

There is a walkway by the tram track. We ran around that...

...until we dropped from exhaustion.

We played the giant matching game in Terminal E. (Note: Terminal E is the best place to eat and is much less depressing in the gate area than Terminal B, which is dark, hot and gross.)

We ate some fruit...

...and some vegetables.

We had several potty breaks.

Baylie especially liked the "princess throne" in this stall.

We rode the monorail...

...several times.

Everyone but me slept, but I neglected to get a picture of that. Too bad because it looked pretty funny.

The 3:00 flight ended up being delayed until around 9 p.m. or so. We were told our crew had been at the airport for an hour, but no one could find them. When they finally showed up, David was able to get the last seat on the plane with Jalen on his lap. They sat on the plane for five minutes, after which the flight was cancelled because the crew timed out. (This means the crew had met the maximum amount of time they are allowed to work based on FAA regulations. Kind of made us wonder where they had spent the hour wandering around the airport...)

So we met up again and realized we would have to spend the night in Houston.

We spent 30 minutes waiting for our bags, then headed to our hotel. We got to the hotel at about 10:30 p.m. At least we were able to watch the ball drop at midnight.

In the end, we flew to Greenville-Spartanburg Sunday morning and rented a car to get home to Columbia. Flying for "free" is relative when you end up paying for two car rentals, a hotel and airport food, but it's still cheaper than paying for three tickets. Thank goodness my kids are good travelers.

At least we're home now, and so happy to be here! Let's hope the rest of 2012 goes a little more smoothly!

A note to my airline friends: We could have boarded a United flight with seats available, but the gate agent - and a red coat - refused to board us saying early out employees couldn't fly UA. So annoying when airport personnel aren't up to date on current policy! I've found a copy of the Employee Travel Bulletin issued back in June and will now carry it with me.