The Angry Journey, Part II

Now, we have reservations at Crowne Plaza and vouchers for that hotel. So we wait for the shuttle to Crowne Plaza. And we wait. And we call. And we wait, and forty minutes later the Crowne Plaza shuttle stops and opens it doors. We scamper up to board and Emmanuel, the driver blocks the doorway and asks if we have vouchers. We do. “Don’t get on the shuttle, we don’t have any rooms for vouchers,” he tells me. Again, the law against homicide gets more justification. I tell him we have reservations and to call the hotel. So he does. Guess what? They have never heard of us. So Crowne Plaza literally won’t let us come to the hotel; we’re hosed.

It’s midnight and we are waiting with roughly one hundred fifty people for hotel shuttles, but we don’t have a reservation. There is much crying amongst the children and little bit inside Amy and I. Amy goes inside to work the phones while I held the baby and went up to every shuttle driver, forcing them to call their hotel to see if they have a room. Twenty more minutes and Hampton’s driver says there are no rooms anywhere. I tell her to make the call a few times and she does. Then, to both of our surprise, she says get in. She takes us to the Hampton at roughly one in the morning. The clerk is happy that just before we called, someone who had reserved two rooms only checked in to one so there is one last room. We check in. Guess what? They won’t honor the vouchers since they are made out to Crowne Plaza. So that’ll be $179.00. Fine, give us the room.

We get our key and he writes down 318. We go to 318 and the card won’t open the door. In fact, the light it shows is yellow. That seems bad. I return to the desk where the clerk verifies that we should be in room 318 and re-codes the key card. So I try again, squeezing past a balling oldest child who is so tired all she can do is cry. As I aggressively yank on the door handle, the door opens and the lady says, “This isn’t your room.” I can’t really argue with her homesteading, so I return to the desk. Confused the clerk decides that they were sent to the wrong room and should really be in 319. So we got keys to 319. It worked.

With the oldest unable to stop crying, no one seemed excited about six people sharing two queen beds, but everyone finally got in bed, everyone except the baby. He was apparently unimpressed with the room and his parents, so he and I went for a nice walk inside the security gates of this Newark hotel, with the armed security guard patrolling the tiny parking lot in a SUV. We walked around for about fifteen minutes and he finally fell asleep (the baby, not the security guard). We returned to the room and I left him to sleep in the stroller. Essentially, everyone got to sleep just after 2am.

The late night meant we slept through the free breakfast. The children blamed me for this, with one little girl saying, “Dad, next time don’t sleep so much so we can eat breakfast.” There is no restaurant we can walk to as Newark is not so pedestrian friendly near the airport. We have about ten hours until our flight. After much debating and a fair amount of PBS Kids, we decide that the airport and our good vouchers is the best way to spend the rest of the day.

We return the airport, take the circus through security again, and attempt to get reimbursed for our hotel stay. Continental shows off its customer service climate by simply telling us they can’t do anything about it so we have to file a complaint online. The number of people who would shut us down immediately rather than discuss this us was incredible. At one point I told a customer service agent that it was a shame United would be polluting its excellent customer service with Continental employees. Her response was something about being a good airline, to which I explained that absolutely no one was attempting to demonstrate this to us. She stopped talking to me. Here again, if homicide were legal…

At least we have food vouchers. We go to an airport restaurant and order some drinks. “Do you have cups with lids?” They don’t but we order apple juice anyway for all three cup drinking children. They bring 32oz bar cups to the table. Before I can tell the three-year-old not touch his juice, he’s wet, crying, and has no more apple juice.

Anyway, we spend hours in the airport with two highlights. The first was watching Amy’s animation when on the phone with Continental Headquarters customer service regarding our hotel. They told her to file a complaint online. Boneheads! The second was the ridiculous stroke of luck regarding the six-year-old and a certain book. She had read every single Junie B Jones book except one because we couldn’t get it at home. Amy bought it for her in St. Louis. This being her first flight, the poor kid had left it in the seatback pocket of the aircraft. Why would I let her do such a thing? Because I didn’t take the time to help them get ready to de-plane, as we were supposed to rapidly get off and catch the cart supplied by the concierge. Instead, I just told them to stuff all of their things into their backpacks and get off quickly. We went to a bookstore in the airport and they of course did not have the book. But, I had time to kill, so I made the poor girl behind the counter call every other bookstore in the airport. On call number three, we found this book and I took the kids on a walk across the terminal to go buy it. This was my one shining moment on the trip where my children weren’t also considering the legality of offing me.

As it approaches 8 pm, it’s time to spend some more voucher money and eat a bit before boarding our overnight flight.