You are kidding me! JFK to Binghamton

As my mother and I are winding down from our annual pilgrimage to NYC. We go to JFK at 1:00 for a 3:10 flight. We look at the arriving/departure flight listing and ours is not on there. We go to the kiosk to print our boarding pass, and we get an oops message and that we have to go to a ticket counter. OK. We stand in line. Get to the counter and ticket man says "your flight has been cancelled". Yikes! What is the next available flight you can get me on. He says you have to go to the purchase counter there is a flight at 5 and at 8 this evening. "Oh crap that is a long line". Yes ma'am. We ask There is nothing you can do? He says no. We go to the other line. It is 50 people long. We get called up to the counter finally we get the same guy. He proceeds to tell us that ALL flights he told us about are all booked and there is no standby available. We said you told us that you could not give us another ticket before. He says sorry at the time I could not? You ass, a re you f$&^ing kidding me? Multiple flights to Buffalo, Boston, Chicago,Tennessee, Orlando, and Long Beach are cancelled. All for various weather related issues like Tornadoes, Snow and Ice and winds. There is no destination that is safe. We managed to get on a flight to Buffalo at 10:55 at night. Since all flights to our original destination are booked through Tuesday morning, and only the "possibility" of leaving JFK is on Tuesday night we shuffle off to Buffalo. Going to Buffalo we would then rent a car to drive the balance of the way home. No big deal. Then as we are commiserating with other passengers in a holding area a woman says hey you want to rent a car and drive? I think about it. She says I have to go to Syracuse. I'll go see what is available. She takes off and goes to another terminal where they rent cars. As this is happening my mom notes that she has been drinking ans is questioning her ability. She comes back maybe an hour later and says I got a car you wanna go? We exchange names her name is Tracey. I see that she is not intoxicated just high strung. We say yes. We cancel our flight and get a full refund. I cancel the rental in Buffalo and head to Budget rental at JFK. While in line we are talking to this guy from Binghamton who is going to be renting because his flight is cancelled too. He is pulling out his GPS and putting the battery in it and before I know it Tracey has him (Bob) driving us to Binghamton. Tracey drives from Binghamton to Syracuse and I close out the journey Syracuse to home. Can you believe it???? It is 6:00 and we are off.
We are all paying $50 to drive and be guaranteed at home. Off we go. Bob travels for a living (scuba training instructor) one of nine in the world with his classification. He talked the entire way. He is an amazing person. He was on a return flight from Moscow, Russia, and has flight issues all the time. He is constantly driving that route. So I felt good about the ride. That and he drove us to Binghamton in great time. He actually lives on the outskirts of Binghamton and lives at the bottom of a very very steep hill. As we were driving down the hill is was a sheet of ice. At one point I believe that he lost control of the car, but he did not let on. I thought we were going to crash down the hill since we were in a spin and kept going from side to side on the hill all the way down. Thank god there was no traffic behind us, in front of us or coming toward us. He regained control and we continued down the hill. I will post about Binghamton to Syracuse tomorrow.

enjoy life!