Matt and I (finally) got home last night. We were supposed to arrive Sunday evening, but thanks to the stupidly-designed Phoenix airport, we missed our connecting flight. Most airports I've been to (which is quite a few by now) don't make you exit and then re-enter security for your connections. Well, the Phoenix airport does. As if that's not bad enough, there are absolutely no signs telling you where to go. It took us a good 20 minutes just to figure out where we were supposed to be. That's bad when you only have an hour to catch your next flight. To make things worse, the airport is actually like 4 separate airports and you have to take a shuttle bus to get from one terminal to the next. We finally found the Hawaiian Airlines desk and checked in. For some reason, they made us do extra security screening (they frisk you and stuff) so we had no chance of catching our plane. I strongly suggest avoiding flying through that airport if you are connecting flights.
We were already pretty peeved, but the runaround that we got from the airlines just added fuel to our fire. Hawaiian Airlines (the one we were supposed to catch) told us that it was United's fault because they only gave us an hour to connect and they should have known better. We didn't really buy this, but we could see that we weren't going to get anywhere with the Hawaiian folks at the airport. So we exited security (again) and took another bus back to United. We had to wait in a line for about 15 or 20 minutes and finally got to talk to someone. As we expected, United couldn't help us, either. They told us to either call Travelocity or talk to Hawaiian. We had anticipated this and told them that Hawaiian was gone for the day, so they gave us a number to call.
We found a relatively quiet place to sit and Matt called Hawaiian Airlines and I called Travelocity. I was hung up on. Matt managed to get through, though, and after talking to two people, we managed to get ourselves booked on a flight for the next day without having to pay an extra fee (which took a while to negotiate). We then rented a car and found a Motel 6. The rest of the day was actually kind of fun because neither of us had ever been to Phoenix. It is a dusty, dirty city in the middle of the desert. Scottsdale was nice, though.
Anyway, it was an adventure to say the least. We were very happy to get home and pick up the cats and sleep in our own bed. Since we live above an Interstate, there is a lot of pollution. Nearly everything in the apartment was covered with a layer of grime, so we spent most of today cleaning. Whew!
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