Transcription from YouTube:
Two weeks ago, some friends of mine on Facebook were lamenting the fact that they only made it halfway across the country before they had to get stuck in the Chicago Airport (which by the way is a thing that happens). They were gonna miss their important party that they were going to, which was two days later on the East Coast. There was absolutely no way that they could possibly make it, and they were turning around and flying all the way back to LA.
When you’re a consultant, that’s not the way that you attack the travel world. My craziest [travel] story of 2018 was coming up against a situation that looked truly impossible, and figuring out every single way that I could make it happen.
Dallas to New York
It was an ill-fated night in Dallas in September, and I needed to get that evening from Dallas to New York. I mean I had an event the whole day in Dallas and of course at about 5:00 p.m., right as the event was ending, a thunderstorm rolled in. Initially it seemed to be just a little thunderstorm. Then planes that weren’t coming in and got diverted,
and there was just a whole mess in the entire system.
And for five hours they pushed the flight, and push the fight, and push the flight, and didn’t cancel it, And finally at about 10:00 p.m. they canceled my flight. It was such a disheartening situation. So I was sitting there at about 10 p.m., the next morning at 9:00 a.m., I had another event in New York and I had to teach all day long- and there is no way that you can drive from Dallas to Newark [in that amount of time].
At one point my colleagues looked at me and said, “Hey, should we write to our contacts for tomorrow, and let them know that we’re not gonna be able to make it? Or maybe we can get an early flight out, but we’re gonna only make it at X time?”
I looked at him with a look of disbelief, like there is no way that we have exhausted all of our efforts right now. What we did was we went and we stood in front of the board of all the flights. There are two airports in Dallas we could have gone to, the other network, but we just figured better to stay at the airport where are we through security. Let’s just figure out any fight that was going anywhere within four to five hours of New York City.
Baltimore to NY
We went to the front desk and got somebody to rebook me on a plate to Baltimore. We left on the flight to Baltimore and about 11:30, we landed very late – right at 3AM. There were almost no services at the airport and I made a run for the only way that I could think of to get to New York that morning, which was the Train.
So I took a cab from the airport to the Train, and took the 3:30 a.m. train from Baltimore. I passed out completely on the train, but set my alarm for when the train was supposed to arrive in New York. After sleeping for about a half an hour, I awoke to announcements coming over, that the tunnel into New York has been shut down and there were maintenance issues on the Amtrak lines. There was no way that we could actually get into the city.
Path Train
So here I was stranded in Newark, and not able to get into the city. And at this point I was so tired and so delirious that the only thing I knew that I needed was a shower. So I figured out the quickest way to get to the downtown area of the city where I knew a couple of hotels were, was just to take a path train.
I called the hotel that we had cancelled from the night before because we weren’t gonna make it into the city and asked them if they had a spa. and I was able to get into the hotel to take a shower and make it to my event by 8:00 am.
So with basically two hours of sleep on the train, and only a freshening up of a shower, but a tremendously long travel day. We did make it from Dallas.
Craziest Travel Story of 2018
It was the craziest travel story of [2018] the year, but it reminded me that consultants are really in the top 1% of the world in terms of travelers and their ability to get from one place to another. We’re also slightly insane; I mean taking that trip was just totally nuts!
If you have a great travel story from 2018 I would love to hear it. And if you ever have questions about how to work the travel system and you want to talk about those, then we’d love to chat about that too.
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