My Trip Home From Hell ...

[ArtWilliams]

So my wife, my teenage daughter, a friend of my daughter and I have been in Orlando for a week. On the last day (Saturday), my wife has an early appointment so we get up at 5:15am and I drive her to the airport.

That means I am in charge of getting the remaining three of us back to Toronto, Canada. I return home and wait for 9:00am to wake up the girls and get them to the airport for our 1:00pm flight. My daughter comes out at 7:30am and says her friend Teresa did not come back from the pool last night. Instead, "very drunk and acting like a whore" as my daughter put it, she left with a group of people. Now Teresa even at this young age has made a number of bad decisions along this line in the past though in the three years we have taken her on our vacation nothing like this has ever happened.

Okay, so I call resort security because we don't know where any of these people are staying in a place with hundreds of condo units. Security notifies their guards and gate houses. The gentleman helping us says we should call the Orange County 911. I figure that there is a 99% chance that Teresa is fine but hey Ted Bundy was a nice guy so you have to err on the side of caution. I make the call and wait for the Officer.

At 11:15am we are fucked. No Teresa and we will now miss our plane. March Break in Florida is the second most heavily traveled period for Canadians. How we'll get home, I have no idea.

Minutes after the police come, Teresa phones. Crying, she says she remembers nothing of the evening beyond have a couple of drinks. My daughter consoles her and we head for the airport.

I convince the U.S. Airways ticket agent to re-ticket us. We are lucky. She could of said sorry it is your own fault and you're on your own. There is a catch. The next flight back is Tuesday. Fuck, everything is filled! She does some searching. She can get us to Montreal if we fly through Charlotte NC. That will get us in about 2am Sunday morning. I said we'll take it. I figure that if nothing else we can take a five hour train ride back to Toronto on Sunday.

I use my laptop and find a couple of cheap rooms near the Montreal airport. Luckily there are a number of seats on a local commuter airline for Sunday morning. Cost for the hotel and plane tickets, C$1000! We get up and out early Sunday morning. A grand lighter and about 18 hours later I walk through my front door. The kid's dad says that he'll pay for the flights and hotel and, as you can imagine, he apologizes profusely. They have money so I suspect that I won't be out of pocket.

Needless to say Teresa is now on our personal do not fly list!