Well the Great Sabbatical Adventure got off to a rather rocky start! My flight on JetBlue from JFK to Sacramento was cancelled on the day I arrived (Sunday 27 July) due to "weather". There were a few showers in NY, but nothing that should have caused the level of drama that I experienced. That meant finding a (highly over-priced) airport hotel (which the airline declined to pay for - "we don't pay compensation for 'weather events'"!) and then catching the Sacramento flight the next day.
I arrived at the airport the next day only to find that the flight (the one and only direct NY-Sacramento flight) was cancelled again due to a domino-effect from the chaos caused by the "weather" conditions the previous day. Tuesday night's Sacramento was fully booked, so there was no guarantee that I'd get on that one! By this stage I was starting to wonder if I would ever get here. Because of the wide-scale flight cancellations on Sunday, all the flights to California were fully-booked, but they put me on stand-by for a flight to Oakland (just outside San Francisco), which I didn't get onto. Fortunately I made it onto the second/last Oakland flight for the day (still on the stand-by list).
Of course, that still left me rather far from Sacramento and the Hobsons. When I phoned Colin from Oakland airport to see what I should do from there, I got this funny stereo effect, and turned around to find him sitting down next to me! He had had to do some business in SF that day and had stayed on to fetch me from the airport - I don't think I have ever been so glad to see him before! That was about 9:30pm, and after a longish drive, we were safely home here in Sacramento just before midnight.
My impression of JetBlue was not at all good: they were highly inflexible in terms of prioritising passengers displaced by the cancellations or providing any kind of assistance to stranded passengers. Hopefully I never have to fly on them again!
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