monkey nonsense

so i normally don’t travel too much so i’m rather inexperienced when it comes to travel arrangements. and i’m a normally very disorganized person so i usually make really simple plans and hope that i don’t mess them up. but this past weekend, i had the worst travel experience to date.

• the friend who i was staying with had been asking all week for my flight information but i’d been really busy at work so kept putting it off. finally, late thursday afternoon, right before leaving the office, i decided to online check-in. for some strange reason, my confirmation number does not work. that’s when i noticed…. my flight was for THAT morning. i had booked for the wrong day! BAH!!! i couldn’t believe how stupid i was, but on the same side, i was surprised that it hadn’t happened to be before considering how disorganized i am.
• so i had to drive to BWI and get a standby voucher. this allowed me to keep my original ticket and not have to pay again. had i not realized my mistake until friday morning, my ticket would’ve already been processed and i would be out of luck. thank you american airline! your customer support people really helped me!
• so after driving to BWI and back, it was already past 9pm. i fretted about how to pack when flying standby… can you check in baggage? how do they know whether to put it on the flight if you’re not certain to be on the flight?! i bugged a bunch of different people and got all sorts of different responses and then finally called american airlines again to confirm what would happen. oh, and also because i realized i had a connecting flight that i also needed to be on standby for. (american was on it… i was already on the standby list for both flights!) after i packed, i slept for about 2 hours and then went to may’s place because she’d offered to drive me to the airport at the buttcrack of the morning (thanks!). when i called her, she was surprisingly awake for the hour! (important later!!) i drove to the airport and then gave her my car (because she’d drive it down to dulles when she flew out).
• luckily, i got standby seats on both flights. so at the airport gate, i remembered i had to text my friend to let her know i got on the flight. so i got my cell phone out to text her… aaaaaaand then i realized i left my cell phone in my car from when i called may!! so i don’t have many phone numbers memorized (luckily i have some! because i went through a stretch of like 6 months where my cell phone screen was cracked so i had to dial by memory) so i didn’t know may’s number and i wasn’t sure that she was still in my car (and had noticed the cell phone in there) so i was trying to remember someone else who knew may who could call her. but who’d be awake at like 5am! finally, i decided to call tina because she mentioned she would be in CA by the time i arrived… so i figured she’d either be at the airport like me orrrrr she’d already be there and it’d be 2am and she might be awake hanging out or something. so i used my credit card to use a pay phone to call her LONG DISTANCE… only to have her hang up on me. hang up! worse than just letting it go to voicemail! jerk. FINALLY, i got online through my work laptop’s iConnect that lets me piggyback off other people’s pay-to-use wifi and i sent may an email asking her to bring my cell phone (and i got a few phone numbers written down)
• when i landed in san jose, i had to get back online to ask my friend if she was done with work (she would be by the time i arrived in SF). i also emailed to let tina and people in san jose know that i wouldn’t be able to hang out with them in san jose since i was without cell phone. apparently, one of them called the airport to page me…. but i was so out of it, i didn’t even hear… so i drove to SF with no problems and parked my car right on the same block as my friend. i darted inside to drop off my stuff and then we went to go eat. because it was noon… which was 3pm my time and i’d been awake for 12 hours without food!!! … and that’s when we saw the parking ticket. in the ~20 minutes i was in her apartment… i got a parking ticket for not curbing my tires! bah!!! because she lives on one of the hills in SF… i didn’t even remember all those rules from driving school! BOOO

the rest of the trip was less eventfilled. the wedding was nice, i ate lots of good food, i got a nice tour of all the little streets of SF. very fun trip. just a very stressful start.