Travel nightmare!!!

This series of unfortunate events will make you cringe (mostly on behalf of my parents). Before I left for LA, I had to decide if I wanted to take my passport or just let my mom bring it since I will be meeting them at the airport on the 28^th of Jan. I don’t need my passport to fly to La, so why carry it (worst decision ever)!!! That Tuesday morning my parents had a flight scheduled to leave Atlanta at 12:30PM and arrive in LA at 2:30PM. This was right before shit it the fan in Atlanta because of the ice storm (and 2 inches of snow). Our flight to Sydney was scheduled to leave LA at 9:30 PM so they had ample time to make the flight….NOT. They boarded their Delta flight and then were returned to the gate 3 hours later because federal law says that you can’t sit on an aircraft for more than 3 hours. The whole process on de-icing the plan had taken that long, so now it was delayed 3 hours, leaving 4 hours to make the connecting flight. At this point Atlanta was freaking the hell out, schools still had kids in them that couldn’t get home, people were having to leave their cars on the road and walk places (most of you know because you were probably stuck in the madness). The flight ended up being delayed for full day and they only arrived in LA at 12:30AM. As you can remember our flight to Sydney was leaving at 9:30, so we missed that flight. Delta was kind enough to say that they could put us on one of their flights leaving non-stop for Sydney at 4AM, but since we were traveling on Fiji Airways, they would not sign the tickets over because they did not want to lose the money we paid for our tickets…RUDE and so selfish! Needless to say the reps on the phone were no help and kept saying we would have to pay $1100 plus to purchase new tickets, because we were “no shows” for the flight. Excuse me person but I am not going to be a happy camper if my $1400 ticket turns into a $2400 total!!!! You stupid ding bat, my mom called the airline to say that our flight had been delayed and we would not be able to make the flight, but you couldn’t answer the damn phone! Luckily she was able to send an email, not that it helped they still were trying their best to make us purchase new tickets. Needless to say I got a taxi to the airport after partying it up with Alex and David, but we could not get on the delta flight. I was drunk and exhausted, we could not even get a hotel room because all were booked so this chick just slept on the floor while I charged my phone. It’s probably a good thing I was drunk, because it would have been way more uncomfortable! Finally at 8:30AM (8 hours later) we got a hotel room! The Fiji employees only got to the airport at 4:30 so we went to the hotel, ate some waffles, all took showers and little cat naps and then headed back to the airport to plead our cases and try not to pay $1100 each for our new tickets. Luckily we were able to be put on stand-by and just had to wait to see if anyone had cancelled their flight. The flight itself was overbooked by 5 people so it was going to take a miracle! Leonard, the Fiji airways supervisor was a blessing! He was very helpful and apologized for the information we had received from the 1800 number representatives (which was all false!). We were never going to have to pay for new tickets that was only if we refused to go on stand-by. He worked really hard to get us on the flight and at 8PM on the 29^th we were on our way to Australia! We board the plane which is scheduled to leave at 9:30PM but of course that isn’t the end of the series of unfortunate events….The plane which we had just boarded had an mechanical problem with the electrical wiring of the fuel pump. This delayed us 3 hours, but eventually was fixed. Now our connecting flight from Nadi, Fiji was scheduled to leave at 7AM. The delay made us miss that flight too, luckily a good majority of the plan was catching that connecting flight so they quickly did some switching around and problem was solved. The only bad thing is our family in Australia doesn’t know we are 2 hours behind, since our new flight to Sydney only departed Nadi at 9AM…oh well. I guess they will figure it out sooner or later!