Adventures in Air Travel

So what happens when two Auto Restoration guys head out across the country on business?....the answer is...Almost Anything.

Our trip from Pittsburgh to Indy (with a stopover in Cincy) was pretty uneventful. The car rental went fine and our hotel was decent.....so far so good. It's when we went from Indy to Jacksonville (initially via Cincy and Atlanta) that things went downhill. We checked our bags at the Indy ticket counter and proceeded through security with no problem but as we were putting our shoes back on at security, we heard our names announced over the PA. We though "this can't be good"...turns out we were wrong. The airline had found a way for us to avoid making the trip through Cincy and could put us on a direct flight to Atlanta. Cool.....so we waited. Then the flight was delayed....no problem, our flight from Atlanta to Jacksonville wasn't scheduled to take off until 10:45PM. We had plenty of time.
We arrived in Atlanta with a couple of hours to kill so we grabbed something to eat...then it was nearing time to board our flight to Jacksonville....except that there was another flight still sitting at the gate. Our flight was delayed...and it was packed. After much confusion at the gate, we finally got off the ground a little after midnight and landed in Jacksonville a bit after 1:00AM. We were told to go to baggage conveyor #1, which we did. Needless to say, our bags did not arrive. We were not alone, at least a dozen other travelers met the same fate. The airline gave us an "overnight kit" with a t-shirt and some toothpaste/shaving items and told us the bags would arrive sometime in the morning.
By now it's after 2:00AM....the rental car counters are closed so we have no rental car. Fortunately, our hotel was near the airport, so it was a short taxi ride to the hotel. Also fortunately, the hotel still had a room for us. By now, we were exhausted.
The next morning, we took a hotel shuttle back to the airport, picked up the rental car, met the plane with our luggage and managed to make it over to the Amelia Island Concours in plenty of time to see the show.
All in all, it could have been worse.
As it turned out, we ended up sharing our flight out of Jacksonville the next day with designer Chip Foose and NHRA driver "Fast Jack" Beckman. A few flight delays later and we were back in Pittsburgh. We got to the baggage area and waited while the bags came down the chute...ours weren't there. We then looked in a pile of bags that had arrived on earlier flights...lo and behold...our bags had beat us home. Another triumph for clean living!