Missed flights and another good quote

Well I'm in Madison, Wisconsin right now for Trek Travel end-0f-the-year meetings (read: have a few meetings then party our assess off with the guides who took the time to come :o) It's been great so far, but this week the guides have gone home and it's just the office staff to stick it out in meetings and training for now.

Fun story on my way over here - I somehow managed to show up at the airport 1 minute too late for my flight from Amsterdam to Detroit (they had moved the flight time up 15 minutes without announcing it - bastardo's!!!). So they wouldn't let me on the flight :o( No big deal, right? Everybody's missed flights before - they just book you on the next flight out and you wait at the airport a couple hours. Wrong.

Seems my travel karma had finally caught up with me. I've always showed up within 1 hour of flight departure and never had any problems - but this time things changed. Not only had I missed the flight, but the airline had cut a lot of their scheduled flight times, so instead of catching the normal flight 2.5 hours later I was going to have to spend the night in Amsterdam! Oh yeah - maybe I forgot to mention too that the ticket was non-transferrable/non-refundable. So not only do I have to dish out for a new flight (not cheap), I also have to find myself a hotel.

I thought about it for about an hour and realized I was a dumbass and it's finally caught up to me, so I went back to the counter to buy the ticket. Hoping against hope things would be different with this person I immediately started in complimenting her about her ring (which was actually super cool) and the Sinter Klaus pin she was wearing. Sure enough, the good karma returned - she gave me the ticket and I didn' t have to pay (she didn't say anything about it, so I wasn't sure if I should thank her or not - in the end I didn't but I sent her happy thoughts!). Not only that, but I didn't have to pay the extra baggage fee OR a transfer fee! Yehaw!!!

To top things off, I got in touch with Geoff's sister Tracy and went into town to have dinner and beers with them - great chance to see them and their place before they move to Montreal in 2 weeks.

The next morning I'm on my flight bright and early and make it to Madison a 1/2 day late :o) All in all a good experience salvaged from near disaster - looks like Christmas was early for me this year!

OK - gotta get out of here for now - but no training today (too cold, and I've been riding the trainer and running the treadmill all last week and it's driving me nuts!). Actually I got out yesterday for a 1.5 hour MTB along the bike paths in Madison with a friend from work that was pretty sweet - at least the sun was shining (can't say that reminds me of Nijmegen!).