Ok, to those of you that were paying attention, I know I said this wasn’t going to be like a diary, but for this post, it kinda will. How else is one supposed to tell the story of international travel?
Our morning started at the brutally early time of 2am. Our flight was going to leave JFK airport at 5:45am whether we were there or not, so it really made a lot of sense to be there. We had packed over the previous week and had remarkably little to do on the morning of our departure. After a drive to the airport provided by my father-in-law we started our adventure by getting grumbled at by a mean lady with a power complex and a dashing red coat. “You’re late. The flight closes in 15 minutes.” To which I immediately thought, “How late am I really if the flight doesn’t close for another 15 minutes?” For obvious reasons I left that thought safely in my head.
After a brief time in a line to check our bags we found that being “late” of course still means that we were left to sit around waiting for anything exciting to happen at the gate. We had time to grab a muffin for breakfast from the Au Bon Pan near the gate, use the facilities, and still sat around after eating. Our flight left on time.
To avoid turning this into a diary, I’ll jump ahead to when our flight was descending toward Miami International Airport. The flight attendant began to ramble off a list of connecting international destinations and the gates we would have to wander off to in order to go to those places. We heard St. Lucia in the list, heard her say gate 51, confirmed it with each other, and even took out the American Airlines magazine with the airport maps in it and figured out how we would get to that gate. Once in the Miami airport we walked to the departures board, confirmed the time of our flight and somehow entirely failed to verify the gate number before wandering off to gate 51.
On our way to the gate we hit up another restaurant for a pre-made turkey and cheese sandwich to split so we wouldn’t starve to death on the longer leg of our travels to St. Lucia. Then we made our way to a semi-crowded gate area that had additional people showing up from time to time. We ate our lunch and assumed all was well. The time we were expecting to start boarding came and went and my wife decided to go for a last minute pit stop before they started. That’s when it soaked in.
The board at the gate we were told to sit at was not international at all. It was to Chicago. That flight was leaving 10 minutes later than ours and that was why they hadn’t started boarding yet, but still had people arriving to the gate area. My heart started pounding as I tried to figure out how to get us where we needed to be in the now very limited time I had to get us there. I grabbed my wife’s hand and took off at a power-walk pace to the nearest departure board. That board said gate 34.
Now for those of you that are taking notes, gate 51 is not the same as gate 34. We had been blatantly misinformed and at our own fault failed entirely to verify our information until it was almost too late. With this new information and signs over our heads telling us that gates 40 through 31 are this way, we resumed our morning power-walking session. Somehow, we missed it. My wife and I are both reasonably smart people and when a sign says gates 40 through 31 are this way, we figure that is exactly what we would find. Yet there was no 34. We hit the area where 31 was, hit a bend in the corridor and started seeing signs for other sections of the airport.
This was not a good time to have misleading airport signs. Using the closest aproximation of my previously mentioned intelligence that I could muster considering the situation, I flagged down one of those carts they use to drive around old people. I figured if someone would know where our mysterious gate was, it would be him. The answer was almost literally “there is a side hallway on the left near the vending machines.” Now I’m no airport designer, but it seems that I would either have designed this better or added additional signage to point happless travelers in the right direction. A sign indicating that gates 40 through 31 are this way was a good start, but right away I would have put another sign that said “oh by the way, you guys that want gates 34-36, go down that hallway next to the vending machines.” We arrived at gate 34, verified this time what we were about to do, and immediately handed in our boarding passes and got on the plane.
Words to the wise: When you travel, verify the gate number every time you pass a departure board. They change all the time.