Kathy Lin

This year, travel during the holidays finally screwed me over. I guess I’ve been pretty lucky these past couple of years but bad luck crushed me yesterday. I was heading out to Berkeley to have dinner with Keen; Chris and I left my parent’s place in Antioch at 6 PM for a 7 PM dinner. Things were looking bad when the Contra Costa police closed off EVERY lane of westbound Highway 4, which is the ONLY highway leaving the suburbia middle-of-nowhere land my parents live. Chris and I were forced off of the highway onto a road called Railroad Avenue. That exit is about 3 exits from my parent’s, so we were sitting there for 2 1/2 hours to travel about 7 miles.

Sadly enough, a woman was killed trying to cross Highway 4 after a minor car accident, at least according to the Contra Costa Times. What would possess her to try to cross three lanes of traffic moving an average of 60 mph is really beyond me.

So, our ETA in Berkeley at 7 PM was grossly mistaken and I didn’t get to see Keen at all, which was a real bummer. I ended up going straight to the Oakland airport, getting there at 9:30 (had to stop at the In N’ Out for a quick dinner). My flight was at 11 PM. I can only imagine what would have happened if I left my parents place later than 6 PM. Apparantly the highway was closed for eight hours.

Turns out it didn’t matter that I got to the airport on time because my flight was delayed by an hour anyway. The JetBlue flight to JFK that left from the gate I was waiting at never took off. They sat on the runway for 2 hours before deplaning right before the Dulles flight was going to board. So they had to move the JFK plane to another gate, but they had already told all of the passengers waiting for Washington Dulles to move to another gate. We all got called back but ended up waiting for luggage after we had boarded. I guess we were in the air at around midnight CA time. I didn’t bother staying awake because the guy sitting next to me looked like the chatty type. I wasn’t in the mood to chat, if you know what I mean.

I opened up my bleary eyes at 8 AM, EST after a few hours of sleep. I had a short debate with myself as to if I should go to work, but I decided I wouldn’t be that productive … Turns out my sisters didn’t fare much better in the travel department. As I was driving hom from the airport, I got a call from my older sister who said she finally made it back home after at 16 hour train + bus ride. Then my twin sister called me to tell me she had to divert to another highway (because of snow in Southern California — very weird) and then had to divert again because of a bad accident, which made her usual 8 hour trip into a 12 hour trip. Yippee.

But at least I didn’t lose my luggage.