On Sunday night, my best friend Laura was supposed to land at Norfolk International. Unfortunately, the fine folks in Denver overfueled her plane (Seriously?), the problem took two hours to correct and she missed her connecting flight at Dulles. The airline gave her two options, drive to Norfolk or wait for a 1 p.m. flight on Monday to ORF. It was no big deal for me, so after I got off work Sunday night I just jumped in my car and drove to pick her up.

Then, yesterday happened. While Laura was attempting to check-in online, this fine airline (I'm not using their name because I'll be their passenger in just under a month...and who really knows who reads these blogs) told her because she hadn't taken her flight from Dulles to Norfolk...they'd canceled her trip back to California. About 5 phone calls later, the situation was finally straightened out. Sheesh.

Laura's tale of holiday travel woes doesn't hold a candle to my experience last year right before Christmas. On the Thursday before Christmas, I found myself on a plane, headed to Norfolk for a job interview right here at WVEC. There was a lot of plane changing involved. I left Redding, California at 6 a.m., flew to San Francisco, then to Dulles and then was supposed to fly to Norfolk. Everything went smoothly until I got to Dulles. My flight from Dulles to Norfolk kept getting delayed....as in 5 hours delayed. For a short time, it even disappeared from the board and the fine airline (same one Laura was flying) couldn't offer me any explanation as to what exactly was going on.

Sometime when I was standing at a rental car counter determined to drive to a job interview in a state I didn't know, my flight was called. I landed in Norfolk at 2 a.m., arrived at my hotel downtown at 3....with just enough time to catch a catnap before my breakfast meeting with the people here at 13 News at 7 a.m. (I still can't believe they hired me. I was barely coherent.)

The flights back to California were no better. If you remember, December 2006 was when Denver got buried under something like 10 feet of snow. My trip from Norfolk to Dulles was fine, but I waited at Dulles for 9 hours for my flight to San Francisco (Apparently. my plane was coming from Paris and when it landed at Dulles they loaded up 30 Denver-bound passengers and left the San Francisco folks stranded), and missed my flight back to Redding. For my parents, it was no big deal...they picked me up in San Francisco and we went back home. The next day was the real joy however, with no clean clothes and no Christmas presents, I was one of those stressed-out-last-minute-shoppers I write stories about so frequently.

So, in a very large nutshell, that's why I hate flying around the holidays. I'm not looking forward to December 17th.