No, THIS was the flight from hell!

Hey, everyone. Arrived back in Toronto this morning from what was supposed to be a routine, 24 hour business trip. Where to begin?

Thursday night -- as I'm heading off for the airport, I'm involved in a screaming match with the powers-that-be at work. I won't get into all the details, but I was extremely pissed off by the end of it all, and I let them know.

I was headed to Portland, Maine via Toronto then Detroit, starting at 6 p.m. Or so I thought. There I was roughly a ninety-minute delay from Toronto for reasons that were unclear to me. My connecting flight was supposed to be at 8:50, so I was quite panicked. We arrived in Detroit at 8:40, and immediately I went to a ticket counter and asked them if they could call my gate to hold the flight. They said there were no guarantees, but they did call ahead.

Little did I know that the gates were, like, football fields apart. Detroit seems like a HUGE airport. I was soaked in sweat by the time I got to the proper gate. They give me this whole speech about how they weren't supposed to let me on the plane, blah blah blah, but they'd get me on. So great, I'm very thankful, slip onto the plane and everyone's in a bad mood. At first I thought they were pissed at me because I held everything up. But no, there was ANOTHER DELAY in Detroit. And this was, I'm going to say, about two hours. Two hours in one of these little 30 or 40 set jets, people muttering and sighing loudly, the sweat still sticking to me and the temperature turned waaaaaay the hell up. It wasn't a pleasant flight at all. Lucky for me I had the foresight to bring a portable DVD player with, and watched a good chunk of a South Park disc before the batteries died.

So I arrived in Portland, it was past 1 a.m. I am STARVING by this point (didn't get to stop for dinner, and neither flight had anything to serve except pretzel sticks because they were both "short flights". Thankfully, my hotel was only eight minutes from the airport, and the nice folks at the Sheraton had upgraded me to a suite, which I would have enjoyed immensely had I not had to wake up in less than five hours. So I gave up on finding something to eat and tried to salvage forty winks or so.

The next morning went quite well. I felt I accomplished my goals for covering the event, made some good contacts and even landed interviews with all the people on my wish list. I considered it to be a success and even broke some news, but those powers-that-be at work were less enthusiastic. So I was pissed off again. REALLY pissed this time.

Now, stupidly, I didn't take my laptop with, which meant searching in hotels and shopping malls in Portland for Internet kiosks to send messages to my work. I found a couple, and all them failed to work properly. It was a comedy of errors, for sure.

By five, I headed back to the airport for a 6 p.m. flight. This one was only delayed by only 30 minutes, which gave me more than an hour at the Philadelphia airport for my connecting flight (I had a choice to be flown through Washington or Philly on the way back; I don't know why I chose Philly. It was just an airport. Did I expect to see people being thrown through tables or something? I don't know).

It was a bad decision because... you guessed it - another delay! This one was more than two hours, without ANY explanation from the ground crew, flight crew, whatever. So instead of being home by 11:30, I ended up getting in a few minutes before 2 a.m.

Argh... I feel like shit now and still have some work to do before leaving for Halifax again this week. I am so exhausted now...