www.thefilemyrs.com > Birding > Texas 2006 > Update #1

	TEXAS 2006 Hill Country Big Bend NP Davis Mountains
Bert Filemyr, Connie Goldman, Karl Lukens, Art McMorris, Ann Scott

Update #1
Monday April 24
Posted evening of Monday April 24th

Sometimes plans come together and sometimes plans fall apart. Today things fell apart. We had planned on being in San Antonio by 10:30 am and birding by 11:30 am.
But.............................As we approached takeoff, on our Continental Airlines plane from Philadelphia, the pilot noted that one of the engines was not functioning properly. We were forced to return to the gate and exit the plane. It was distressing to discover that the maintenance workers had to come to Philadelphia from Newark. This meant a considerable delay. What was more depressing was the actions of the gate agents for Continental Airlines. As we exited the plane the announced that they had all connections covered and they would call us to the counter by name to give us our new itinerary. Well that happened very slowly. After three hours they had called three passengers. After prompting they admitted that the maintenance workers had not arrived and when they did arrive it would take four or more hours to make the repair. Not only that they had not really done anything about rebooking us on other airlines. Only after considerable prompting we were able to be rebooked on Delata flights. We did not leave Phialdelphia until almost seven hours after we were scheduled to depart. If we had not made a minor scene with the Continental gate agents we would have been in Philadelphia, much, much longer. Continental came up real small on customer service.

We had planned on birding the Mitchell Wetlands this afternoon. But it was not to be. Instead of arriving in San Antonio at 10:30 am we arrived at 7:50 pm. We missed a day of birding. We headed directly to Kerrville and a well deserved rest. A very disappointing day.