Crazy Travel Days (Part 1)

In this blog, I want to share with you what travel looks like on the World Race. World Race travel days are always an adventure, but this set of travel days was the craziest that I have ever experienced! Many times, we have long layovers and circuitous routes in order to make the money stretch the furthest. We also try to arrive places super early so that we have a buffer in case anything unplanned happens. 

With that being said, we had finally finished two weeks of training (1.5 weeks for leaders plus half a week for the participants) and were set to leave Atlanta at 2am. At 2am, all 48 of us on Y Squad met in the hotel lobby and took the hotel’s shuttle, in small groups, to the airport. Once we all arrived at the ATL airport, we then had to wait for the MARTA (Atlanta’s train system) ticket station to open. Once it opened at 5am, we bought our tickets and went on our way towards the Megabus station in downtown Atlanta. Getting in and out of these subway-type trains with 48 people and all of their large bags is an experience; you just hope that the doors don’t close before everybody is on! Luckily, everybody successfully made it on and off the train at the appropriate stops. Once we arrived at the Megabus station, we waited for about an hour or so for our departure time. Finally, 7am rolled around and we were able to board our bus headed to Nashville. The 4 hour bus ride gave most people some time to catch up on some sleep, but unfortunately I have never been able to sleep on buses or planes. Generally, until I hit 48 consecutive hours of travel, I can’t sleep. But, after a brief stop in Chattanooga, we arrived in Nashville around 11am. From the bus stop in Nashville, we ordered Ubers/Lyfts to take us to the Nashville airport. We arrived at the Nashville airport around 12pm, but our flight wasn’t until 7pm;  learning to wait, be patient, and pass the time are crucial skills that get developed throughout the World Race. Typically, you cannot check your luggage until 4 hours before a flight, and so all 48 of us sprawled out in the Nashville airport for about 3 hours, trying to stay out of the way. 

About 3 hours into our waiting, it was announced that our flight would be delayed and would not be leaving until about 9-9:30pm, scheduled to get into San Francisco around midnight. The problem was our connecting flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong left at 1:15am so everyone would have to get all their luggage from baggage claim, go to the international terminal to check their luggage, and then go through customs and security all in about an hour. After many calls and a lot of waiting on hold with the customer service departments of the airline companies, we ended up receiving word in Nashville that our flight was not in fact delayed and would be leaving on time. Praise God! It was 5:30pm by that point and we had not checked our luggage because we were still trying to figure out the best course of action. So once we found out that the flight was not delayed, we had to hustle a bit to get the 48 of us checked in and through security in time for our 7pm flight. 

At long last, it was finally 7pm and we were sitting on our on-time flight to San Francisco. I was getting settled in my seat and deciding how I was going to spend my time on the flight when I heard a bit of a commotion towards the back of the plane. I turned around and saw one of the flight attendants kicking one of our participants off of the plane. The flight attendant said that the participant looked too sick to fly and needed to get off the plane immediately. Some of the other participants were trying to convince the flight attendant that it was okay and the sick participant would be alright. The flight attendant wasn’t budging and so I went and talked to her and told her that we had 4 connecting flights that would all be affected if we missed this flight, but still the flight attendant wasn’t budging. So ultimately, the participant, her team leader, and I got off the plane and the rest of the squad went on to San Francisco without us. 

(to be continued….)