The summer after my 16th birthday my sister was due to deliver her first baby, and I was so excited that I just couldn’t take it. The only problem was that my Mom had flown up a few weeks before school let out to be with her, and my Dad couldn’t leave the business during the busy season. Translation: if I wanted to see the baby, then I was flying up on my own. All the way from Knoxville, TN to Anchorage, AK!
And I wasn’t bothered by it. After all, it’s not like this was my first trip. So my Dad took me to the airport and signed me up as an unaccompanied minor. He knew that I could handle it, but wanted to just make sure than someone would be checking on me.
Everything went great until I hit Chicago, wind, rain, hail, all of the makings of one crazy storm in the exact location that I needed to fly out of. So at roughly 2:00am Delta canceled the flight. I quickly made my way to the ticket counter to schedule my flight for the next day only to find out several cheerful bits of news.
1 – I would have to pick up my bags and re-check them the next day.
2 – The airline would not pay for hotel accommodations since the delay was due to weather.
3 – There was no record of me flying as an unaccompanied minor.
4 – All of the hotels in the area required a credit card in order to book a room. Yeah – At 16 I didn’t have one of those!
Now, here is where things started to get really fun! From the ticket counter I went directly to the nearest pay phone to try and figure out what to do. When I try to call my Mom in Alaska I find that there is no way to reach her because two things have happened while I was in the air. First, my sister and her husband had moved to their new house and gotten a new phone number. Second, my sister has gone into labor and they are at the hospital.
Finally, I called my Dad, my last choice since I knew that this was not something that he would handle very well. He answered the phone quite groggy but woke up quickly once I explained what was going on. He got the phone number of the pay phone that I was standing by and told me to wait there. Which I did…..for the longest 20 minutes of my life.
Answering the ring I was amazed to find my Mom on the other end. And at hearing her voice I broke down into the tears that I had been holding back for hours. She told me that a car was coming to get me to take me to the Marriott and that she had already taken care of the room. Turns out that my Mom spent a lot of time in Chicago on business and had gotten to know the manager at the Marriott closest to the airport. She called and told him what was going on and he took care of the rest. When that car pulled up I have never been so relieved to see a perfect stranger!
The rest of the story is that I flew on up to Anchorage the next day to meet my new nephew and my Mom had quite the conversation with Delta. We ended up with several free tickets, and I flew first class for a long time after that night!
Unaccompanied Minor
- 15
- 7