Vacation: Bonus round!

There are a couple days of updates missing, but writing about today seemed much more relevant. So, skipping ahead -- Upon arriving home from an awesome dance party in Bairro Alto Saturday night, I double checked my morning flight and came to realize that the third leg of my itemerary had been cancelled. turns out you folks in America have a hurricane a'comin. I sat on hold with American hoping to figure out another route , and as the clock ticked closer to my wake up call I decided to just figure it out at the airport. After about 45 minutes of of restless sleep I sleepily stumbled into a cab and thus this adventure began.

I booked my flight through American, but the international legs are being carried by Iberia. This has created a mass of confusion. I told the gent at the check in that I wanted to re-route outside of Miami but he assured me he did not show that flight as being cancelled, so I would be fine. I arrived in Madrid an hour later to the news of an 8 hour delay. They told me that was the earliest flight they could get me on and everything else for the day was booked.

Tears.

I considered taking the train into Madrid but my luck would be they'd change their mind and leave without me. I had a few naps in the terminal, and 8 long ass hours later, as we were preparing to board... They cancelled the flight. Super. I got my luggage so that wouldn't be a possible barrier to a new route and after sitting on hold with American for 30 surely expensive minutes I was (drum roll) disconnected!!

Tears.

Iberia doesn't seem to think they should need to be re-routing me even though there is absolutely no reason for me to be flying through a hurricane, and when I did track down an AA human being in the terminal several hours ago they told me Iberia would have to re-route me.

Tears.

So new plan is to get to the hotel and hopefully have someone in America deal with American who is surely very busy re-routing everyone out of Florida. Ideally I will the attempt to spend a lovely evening in Madrid, a city I was just thinking last week I had no interest in. Where is Shiva when you need her!? I know I'm making and have made about a thousand mistakes in dealing with this today which is only frustrating me more so trying to pull myself together and make the best of this. I think the worst part is that the last few days / 10 days have been so awesome (more on those to come), it only makes me sadder to leave. I should have never gotten on that plane in Lisbon, and I'd be laying on the beach in The Algarve with a couple hos. REALITY SUCKS

Update: naturally the hotel had one person to check in about 300 people, and that is when it hit me - chill out. I got out of line and watched a movie on my iPad until it was my turn. That resulted in a huge suite with a king size bed and a treadmill. I had chorizo and manchego for dinner (though i really miss thst portuguese bread). No one knows when we will leave tomorrow, if at all, so I'm just going to relax and let it work out. I ain't got nothing to get back to but work -- though there is the matter of not having a power adaptor and watching this device start to dwindle. Will solve that tomorrow. For now I'm going to get some rest and watch jersey shore en Espanol.