Trouble getting to HSNCT

etchdulac · Post by **etchdulac** » Fri May 25, 2007 7:16 pm

If any teams have difficulty with ait travel this weekend, I'd like to hear about it. I was supposed to volunteer at the event, and I believed I was beating the impending inclement weather by leaving Thursday. When I got to the airport in San Antonio, half the outbound flights on American were already cancelled, the place was overflowing with stranded people, and I was told I couldn't get on another flight to Chicago for at least two days.

This all while it wasn't even raining. But the weather issue did not appear to be on the Chicago end of things either.

So NAQT is going to get its money back for my ticket, and Joel indicated they weren't hurting for volunteers. But if too many people -- teams or staff -- get stuck like I did, it could make things more difficult to organize.

Hope everything goes better for everyone else.

ecks · Post by **ecks** » Fri May 25, 2007 7:43 pm

I just flew today to Sea Tac through Chicago O'Hare and Bloomington with no problems. There's a bunch of cloud cover, but not enough to cancel flights, at least now.

orangecrayon · Post by **orangecrayon** » Fri May 25, 2007 10:04 pm

I was at O'Hare yesterday on my way back to Oklahoma from China. The Chicago area weather was the reason for lots of cancellations and delays in and out of ORD, as there were strong enough gusts for air traffic control to ground planes coming in and going out of the airport, or at least the little regional planes.

Our flight was supposed to leave at 8:05 p.m. Four hours later, we started boarding, and we had one of the shorter delays.

Just sucks that this had to happen HSNCT weekend. Hope it doesn't ground any teams...

Stained Diviner · Post by **Stained Diviner** » Fri May 25, 2007 10:39 pm

The weather is nice today, which is probably when most people were getting here.

I had a long drive home yesterday because a power line got blown over along my normal commuting route. You wouldn't think it would be a big deal, but the roads are already horrible during rush hour.

Philip Marschall · Post by **Philip Marschall** » Sun May 27, 2007 10:37 pm

I heard that Cave Spring was trying to get to the tournament for 24 hours, but I don't remember exactly what their difficulties were.

kamikaze · Post by **kamikaze** » Mon May 28, 2007 3:23 pm

Yeah, we (Cave Spring) had a huge problem trying to get in Thursday to O'Hare. We drove 4 hours from Roanoke to Dulles only to find out they canceled our flight (something due to FAA from what we were told). It seemed like the ONLY flight they could get us out on and in time for the tournament was a flight leaving from Roanoke on Friday. So... we had to turn around that same day and drive back 4 more hours to take our flight the next morning...

That flight ALSO got canceled. I almost gave up at that point but with some luck and help, we managed to fly in late Friday night. I'm glad we came though. It was good times and the team did well. So ends our surreal trip experience...

kcommo · Post by **kcommo** » Mon May 28, 2007 5:43 pm

I flew Thursday evening and had a 3.5-hour delay during my layover at JFK. When we finally got going, the pilot said the problem was that high winds in Chicago had limited the number of open runways at O'Hare.

-Kevin Commo