Stranded (at 100)

This is my 100th post. I was planning to shoot something special for the occasion, but sometimes plans doesn’t go as, well... planned.

First of all, from the photo above (shot yesterday in the middle of the night), it is pretty obvious that my observing run didn’t go very well. We had clouds all the time, including some snow, and we couldn’t open the telescope dome at all. No Mira observation. All I could do was walking down the road to the IOTA interferometer and take a long exposure (30 sec) of the instrument with the MMT telescope enclosure (the cubic building) in the background. The only sources of light are the light coming out from the IOTA control building and the moon, illuminating the mountains through the clouds. What you see in the foreground are two of the movable telescopes of the interferometer (there is a third one behind) resting on the rails that allow them move them around to change the interferometer configuration. I have no idea what are the green reflections in the sky (I don’t think there was an aurora in southern Arizona, even though yesterday there has been one of the strongest solar storms ever recorded, so it may be after all). Some stars are peeking through the clouds in quite an irreverent way.

If my observing plans went wrong, my travel plans are in much worse shape. I should be at home, by now. I am instead in a hotel room in Dallas because my flights have been repeatedly cancelled due to the snow storm hitting the northeast. When I arrived to the Tucson airport this morning I was rerouted through Dallas because the flights through Chicago (my original connection) were all cancelled. In Dallas I directly went to one of the hotels of the airport, since my connection for Boston was the next morning. After more than 20 minutes waiting (they weren’t answering the courtesy phone, grrr...), I got the shuttle to the Courtiard Marriott. I was given a room and all seemed fine until I discovered that I didn’t have the complimentary internet access that I was supposed to have. I called the desk to discover that the shuttle brought me to the wrong hotel (another Marriott in the area), so I spent the next half hour to sort out the mess (cancel the other reservation without paying a penalty, etc...). When finally I got on the internet (at my expenses) Mayli told me that my flight the next morning was also cancelled.

What to do? I called American (30 minutes on hold), and the customer service told me that there wasn’t any free seat on any flight for the next day. With the prospect os staying in Dallas for the next two days I implored the guy to find me anything, and he did find an adventurous connection through Jacksonville (Florida, I didn’t know), Newark and finally Boston (three flights, ugh, the last two on Continental).

Chatting with Mayli though iChat (praise instant messaging), however, we discovered that Continental had many other flights available from Dallas to Boston with only one connection (through Cleveland, Huston or Newark). Not clear why the guy didn’t offer me those flights (that the Continental web site was still offering for sale) I decided to call American again. After 10 minutes on hold the call was interrupted. I tried again and I got another representative after only 40 minutes holds. I explained the situation and her asked her supervisor if she could change me again, and the supervisor said no, because I already had my chance with the previous call. At that point I was quite unhappy and complained until she agreed. After 15 minutes on hold, she came back to me saying that she couldn’t get the line with Continental, and she was giving up. I wasn’t giving up, however, so I implored her to try once more, and at that point I got brutally disconnected.

Then I gave up too, and headed to the hotel restaurant that of course was already close, so that I had to eat a soup and a salad next to a table of black jack (I didn’t know hotels could have gambling in Texas).
So now here I am, hoping tomorrow to get home, with some chances to get just stranded in a city in Florida that until a few years ago I didn’t know it exists... Oh well... I just want to get home!