Best Layover Ever.....but the day after SUX

I arrived in Baltimore Wednesday at about 10pm, and since my mom only got lost once, I was home in Annapolis before the midnight Frasier reruns on Lifetime.

Thursday morning I did a double session of Jazzercise, repacked my little lunchbox with Boca burgers and (much to the appreciation of crew and passenger alike) threw my uniform in the wash. All in all, a perfect layover.

Thoroughly refreshed, I headed back to BWI to finish my trip. With the previous two days being so nicet, I should have anticipated the fallout.

Friday was already scheduled to be a kicker: a barely legal nine hours of crew rest in Dallas, then a three and a half hour flight to EWR, two and a half hours of sit time, followed by a Detroit turn.

Knowing that I could take a little nap later in the day, I managed to get up at 4am and stay awake during the flight to EWR. I actually fell asleep in the crew room (hooray for earplugs and eye masks!) and made it to the plane for DTW.

I knew we got a new lead flight attendant for the Detroit turn (once you are a line holder, you can do amazing things with your schedule like drop trip segments if there is reserve coverage), but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was, Mandy, a girl I had flown with over a year ago.

I was happy for me, but I felt bad for her because she commutes out of Detroit, and going there just to come right back is a terrible tease.

Of course when I say "come right back", that doesn't include the three-hour delay.


But we made the best of it.

We wandered the terminal which, aside from our gate, was full of little prop planes destined for places like Sioux City, Iowa and Kalamazoo, Michigan. We speculated what those airport codes could be (and who exactly wanted to go there). We hit every gift shop and took pictures of each other donning Paparazzi-proof sunglasses and Michigan souvenirs.

At one point we struck up a conversation with a young pilot from Mesaba Airlines (a regional carrier for Northwest) who was also trying to kill a few hours. He told us tales from the sketchy world of local aviation and I dazzled them with obscure honeybee facts I had just learned from the book Peggy gave me for Christmas ("Robbing the Bees" by Holley Bishop).

We were all pretty punchy, and sat there at the mini-Fuddruckers with a pile of french fries and eight dipping sauces regally lined up between us, cracking up at everything until we could no longer stand the evil stares from other customers coveting our table.

ATC finally let us go because our pilots were about to go illegal and we made it back to EWR around 10pm (that makes for a 16hour day).

I didn't get my personal drop for Saturday. Instead, scheduling had a Fort Lauderdale turn lined up for me that got back just in time for me to miss the last flight back to DCA and really mess up my Mother's Day plans.

But it was great to see Mandy again and we had fun with our Mesaba buddy.

It was really an enlightening afternoon. He informed us that the airport code for Sioux City is SUX, and that poor man will forever think of a certain crazy Newark flight attendant whenever there is mention of a honeybee.