The holiday travel plans for this year were simple enough, though granted most people may consider it a little crazy since it would be quite the long travel day to kick off the trip. I’ve done some pretty, what I like to call epic trips in my past, such as flying to 3 different states in 4 days or driving 8 hours back and forth from Vegas to Los Angeles in the same day, but only staying one hour in L.A. I figured this particular day of travel was going to be another one to add to the books and I wasn’t wrong, but it did not play out in the way that I thought.
I had anticipated there would be a higher than normal risk of delays or issues because of the time of year, with both unpredictable weather and the fact that it is one of the busiest times of the year for travelers. But I hoped since the planned destinations were all on the west coast, the chance of encountering major issues due to weather was slim. It turned out to be a pleasant surprise that because of the weather, my random wish for the Christmas weekend, mentioned to a coworker the day before when asked about my plans, came true.
News of a bomb cyclone, named Winter Storm Elliott, was already whirling around a couple days beforehand, so a close eye was kept on the weather forecast despite the fact that all travel plans were in west coast states that were not going be directly hit by the storm. Knowing how big it was and if it turned out to be devastating in other states, I knew that even if we were to experience temperate weather and sunny skies in our various locations, there could still be some ripple effect to our own travel.
The 4-day trip was scheduled to begin on Friday with an early morning 9-hour drive from Las Vegas to Northern California to drop my car off to my parents with the goal of having an early quick dinner to celebrate the holidays with them before heading out for the next destination. The alarm went off at 4:15 am, and my boyfriend jumped out of bed, but I didn’t get up until 4:45 since I had gone to bed much later than him, after midnight and was struggling to wake up. The goal was to leave by 5:30, but it wasn’t until 6am that we were at Costco to fill up the car with gas.
The first leg of the drive was fairly uneventful with only one pit stop to use the restroom and buy sour belt candy to snack on the drive. Then we arrived at Bakersfield Costco in just over 4 hours into the drive which was very busy with a jam packed parking lot, joining a fairly long line to top off the car with gas. The line moved quickly enough and we were back on the road in no time, with some dense fog as the only weather issue to contend with. Nothing compared to what a majority of the rest of the country was having to deal with. About half an hour after leaving Costco, I open Facebook to scroll through posts to kill some time and saw a post on a Costco review group page saying that the POS system was down at many Costco’s across the US due to the storm causing an electricity outage in other states. That meant that gas could not be purchased. I don’t know if Bakersfield Costco was affected or not, but I couldn’t help but feel thankful that I didn’t have to find out the answer and we were able to get gas without any issues or delays! I couldn’t even imagine waiting in a long gas line only to have the system go down and not be able to fill up.
The traffic in the opposite direction to Los Angeles was a lot worse than going Northern California and once again, I felt blessed that the traffic is minimal on our route. After a stop at Harris Ranch for another bathroom stop, I texted my mom our ETA of 3:30pm, but didn’t get a response back as we drew near so figured they likely were not home yet. My parents were at a doctors appointment, anticipating getting home before 5pm. With all the traffic growing progressively heavier and slower entering into the Bay Area, I knew that it would be wise to make our visit even shorter than planned. There wasn’t the luxury of time to go out to eat with my parents since we had to battle even heavier traffic on our way out. To save some time, we grabbed burritos at a local shop nearby and took it to go to bring it to my parents house to eat with them. When I arrived at their home, they were not there, so as we waited for them to arrive, we unloaded the car and spent some time with my brother’s dog, who is sadly showing his old age. After a quick check of traffic conditions after 5pm, we agreed that we were going to have to leave and as soon as we called for an Uber, my parents arrived home. Unfortunately, the reunion was brief with only about 20 minutes since that is how long it took Uber to arrive at the house.
Next on the itinerary was a flight from Oakland airport to LAX where we would spend the rest of our trip. Shortly after getting into the Uber, my boyfriend checked the flight and it showed as cancelled. During the ride to the airport, we had plenty of time to check out all the other flights to several airports in the Los Angeles area that were possible options to try to get rebooked on. There were a few good options so I was not too worried, but little did I know how bad the storm was affecting flights and what was yet to come.
With A-List status on Southwest, I proceeded past the regular line to the priority ticket counter line which was empty. We were immediately booked to a flight to Long Beach, that was supposed to take off at 4:45pm, but had been delayed to 7:45pm. The TSA pre-check line had no one in it and I got through immediately and was feeling pretty lucky at that point. After waiting over 15 minutes for my boyfriend to get through the regular security line, we decide to walk around the terminal to kill some time only to realize 5 minutes into the walk, the flight to Long Beach has been cancelled.
We immediately made our way to the customer service line, and saw it was already long and got diverted to another gate to another customer service line. By the time we saw an agent, the options severely dwindled down with most available flights being the next day only, which is not what we wanted to hear. There was a flight to Palm Springs at 8:30pm but I nixed that option because I didn’t like the thought of another 2 hour drive to get to LA after already doing a 9 hour drive, and that was assuming we would be able to get a one-way rental car for a decent rate. The agent found one option for us, a flight to LAX with a 2 hour layover connection in Las Vegas that would get us to LAX by 3:30am. I couldn’t help but laugh at the thought of going back to Vegas to get to LA when we just drove from there that morning, but I told her to book it anyway because I didn’t want to get stranded in Oakland overnight.
Originally the plan was to spend the night in Torrance, wake up early around 7am to drive 45 minutes to my best friend’s house to catch her as she got home from her night shift before she went to sleep and spend Christmas Eve day with her kids. Dinner was going to be back in Torrance with my boyfriend’s best friend. Then Christmas Day would start with a 7 mile run to the beach and a meal with my boyfriend’s mom ending the day with my boyfriend’s best friend again. Monday was our scheduled flight back to Vegas.
As we waited even longer, with the delays mounting for all flights including our own, we ate a surprisingly very good Banh Mi from Tay Ho in the terminal and further discussed our options:
- Take the flight to Vegas and wait at the airport for 2 hours, possibly more if delays continued, to catch the connection to LAX.
- Take the flight to Vegas and go home, purposefully not taking the connection to LAX and spend Christmas at home.
- Take the flight to Vegas and if the connection to LAX is cancelled, then go home and spend Christmas at home.
- If the flight to Vegas is cancelled, then find the closest hotel in Oakland to stay at and hopefully fly out the next morning on Christmas Eve.
After even more delays we decided on option 2 by the time we boarded the flight to Vegas. After sitting at the gate even longer with the crew trying to figure out why there were so many empty seats on what should have been a completely full flight, we arrived in Vegas at midnight and headed home. After eating a midnight snack, I felt sad that we couldn’t spend the weekend with our loved ones, but was happy to be sleeping in our own bed for the night.
The next morning I woke up, checked my messages and saw that the connecting flight to LAX the night before ended up being cancelled after all. I knew in that moment we made the right decision and Winter Storm Elliott really granted my Christmas wish.
The day before our travel on Friday, I told my coworker of my holiday plans and he replied “Wow, busy, busy!” I couldn’t help but respond that while I was looking forward to spending time with family and friends because the plan was going to be hectic, there was a part of me that wished I could stay home to simply rest and relax.
Turns out I got exactly what I wished for thanks to the bomb cyclone winter storm Elliot. For once, I felt lucky having to deal with 3 flight cancellations and 1 flight delay that landed me back in my hometown, because I knew many people were not so lucky with Elliott, especially those directly hit by it and how many others trying to travel too. The last time I tried to fly during a winter storm I ended up sleeping on the floor at an airport terminal, which you can read more on my Inga Ice Storm Adventures @ HOU blog post.
I had a quiet but lovely Christmas weekend, sans family and friends, while getting the rest and relaxation I needed and wanted! Here are the highlights of how we ended up spending our Christmas Eve and Christmas Day:
- Went to Costco an hour before they closed to stock up on groceries since we emptied the fridge prior to leaving and didn’t have to deal with any crowds in the warehouse or in the gas line
- Attended the soft opening of a local seafood boil restaurant eating Dungeness crab, garlic noodles and crawfish with quail eggs, corn and potato with 20% off the dinner bill
- Booked a room last minute at a 5 star resort for under $100/night and enjoyed a few drinks at the top floor bar with a view of the strip
- Woke up late on Christmas morning and enjoyed a free hotel breakfast before heading back home
- Took a long nap in the afternoon
- Watched Avatar, which was much anticipated and exceeded my expectations
- Last, but not least, I enjoyed leisurely writing this blog post to end my Christmas Day
By the way, we were automatically rebooked to an 8:30am flight on Christmas Day that had a connection in Phoenix which was scheduled to depart at 1:45pm. I kept getting messages throughout the day that the flights were delayed multiple times with the Vegas to Phoenix flight finally departing after 11am and the Phoenix to LAX flight departing after 4pm. I know several people on the Friday evening flight with us were headed to Los Angeles and that they also must have been stranded in Vegas for at least a full day on Christmas Eve and probably spent Christmas morning stuck at the airport and if they were lucky, travelling on whatever flight they were rebooked on. I only hope that they made the most of their stay while in Vegas and eventually made it to their final destination safely.
GGibberish 