Get Me Outta Here! (Suzanne Forster)

This blog has had quite a succession of titles over the last ninety-six hours. Here are a few: Live from Las Vegas, Dispatch from Sin City, Losing My Shirt in Vegas, Losing My Religion in Vegas, Leaving Las Vegas, Trying to Leave Las Vegas, Desperate to Leave Las Vegas, Stranded in Las Vegas, Dead or Alive in Las Vegas?

Is it obvious that my weekend getaway to Sin City was less than stellar? Talk about from the sublime to the ridiculous. Actually, more like from the ridiculous to the sublime to the surreal before it was over. I should have known this was going to be a challenging trip when I saw the size of the security line at the Orange County airport. It was out the door and around the terminal. Gave me a Disneyland flashback.

Then there was the confusion with my son and daughter-in-law, who were flying into Vegas from Portland. This was my first trip on U.S. Air, and we were supposed to meet at the Las Vegas airport, where a car would pick us up so we didn’t have to swelter in the endless taxi lines. But somehow I got left behind. My kids swore there was no U.S. Air flight #60—and they may have been right. When I got down to baggage I saw no U.S. Air carousels, no flight #60 listed anywhere on the displays, and no one I spoke with knew anything about it. I did find my bag near a U.S. Air baggage claim office, but I have no idea how it got there. Was I on a ghost flight?

As I type this from the Las Vegas airport, waiting for what I pray will finally be my flight home after endless delays, cancellations, confusion and chaos, I’m trying to calculate how many hours I’ve spent here, both coming and going, waiting for ground and air transportation. Maybe fifteen total for what was supposed to have been a forty-eight hour hop to and from Vegas for a belated wedding reception.

I logged in three of those hours on arrival, searching for my kids, who were searching for flight #60. Malfunctioning cell phones were part of the problem, and of course, we all ended up sweltering at a taxi stand after all. The car and driver were long gone.

Okay, that’s the ridiculous part so far. Now, let’s get to the sublime, and believe me, I wish there’d been more of it. But hanging out with my kids, who live two states away, is always sublime—and because a relative was celebrating a recent marriage, there were family members and friends I hadn’t seen in years. The Venetian hotel, where we stayed, was also sublime, as was the wedding reception at Caesar’s, the dinner at Delmonico’s and the lunch at Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill. All incredible.

Even losing money at the slots was fun, mostly because I did win once in while, which adds support to my theory that all things in Vegas are designed to keep you gambling. The occasional win is intermittent positive reinforcement, and there is no greater motivator. Seriously. Those poor dogs that Pavlov tortured salivated at the mere sniff of a milk bone.

Here’s my Vegas Discomfort Conspiracy Theory. They don’t want you comfortable unless you have your butt in a chair at a gaming table or a slot machine, even at the airport. Next time you’re at one of the hotels on the strip, notice that there’s nowhere to sit in those huge, ultra-fabulous lobbies. That’s true of the airport, too. There are no rest or lounging areas, other than the chairs at the gate. Also, no real restaurants that I could find, just snack bars. There aren’t even any airline clubrooms there. U.S. Air is supposed to have one, but I never saw any evidence of it, and why would an airline that doesn’t even have a baggage carousel have a clubroom? They want you to gamble, not lounge.

Now, for the trip back, which quickly went from ridiculous to surreal.

Let’s start with the drunk man at the U.S. Air gate, who sat right next to me, slurping on what looked like a huge gin and tonic and talking rhapsodically about Paris, France, interspersed with choruses of Baby, It’s Cold Outside (it was eighty-plus degrees). I pretended to be reading, so he picked on everyone else in the vicinity, determined to strike up conversations where he could. Amazing how agreeable everybody was, until he began to sing. That was it for me, too. I left when he began to accompany himself by beating on his briefcase as if it was a bongo. Later, I wondered what happened to him, and if he fared better than the rest of us headed for Orange County, California on U.S. Air flight 139.

I had a four p.m. flight but got to the airport early, thinking I could get some work done on my book since I had my laptop with me. Silly me. Vegas is the equivalent of adults on spring break. People don’t stop partying when they get to the airport. But as boarding time approached and our plane hadn’t yet arrived, the crowd began to sober up.

We were told the plane couldn’t land because of the high winds. Two hours later, the plane had arrived, but federal regulations required that a new flight crew had to be found. An hour after that, the flight was cancelled. A mad rush ensued to Passenger Services, but after interminable waiting, we were told it was the wrong line, and we should all go downstairs to Ticketing to be reassigned. But again, wrong line. Go to Cancelled Flights.

Eventually it became clear that no one was flying out that night on any airline. We all took turns holding each other’s place in line as we ran across three lanes of airport traffic to get our stranded bags. By the time I got back to the ticketing line, a fight had broken out between a distraught couple and the airline’s manager over vouchers for food and lodging. The couple won, believe it or not. The airline agreed to put us up for the night, which should have been good news, but unfortunately, the nightmare was only beginning.

I never found the shuttle to the hotel, and taxi line was miles long, even at that time of night. The driver I got spoke zero English and had never heard of the hotel. When we finally found it, just by chance, I understood why. It was miles off the Strip, and not a hotel at all. Remember the motel in Psycho, the classic horror flick? This was worse. But I was alone, starving, exhausted and limping from blisters and lower back pain. There was no restaurant and no chance of getting any food, but at least I would get a couple hours sleep before my five a.m. wakeup call. Right? Wrong.

My room faced an unlit alley with blinds that wouldn’t close and a dead bolt that wouldn’t bolt. And did I mention the trains that thundered by every couple of hours, shaking the earth and blasting their whistles? On the way to the airport this morning, the shuttle driver told me airline people were never supposed to be in the rooms by the train. Apparently they made an exception in my case. I feel so special, lol.

So, here I am now, back in the airport at six-thirty a.m. (three hours early because all the later shuttles were full), seriously sleep-deprived and obviously in shock because I’m feeling no pain whatsoever, not even from the blisters. I wonder what happened to the tone-deaf guy with the huge drink. He wasn’t feeling any pain, either. Plus, I never saw him standing in any lines, and I’ll bet he didn’t end up in the Bates motel. He may have been the only smart one among us Sin City refugees. Or maybe he’d flown U.S. Air before.

You know what they say: What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Now I know why they say it. What happens in Vegas should stay in Vegas. Just not me, please. Get me outta here!

Suz, the stranded