Unaccompanied Minors: What Could Go Wrong?
My brother and I were traveling back from Newport (we were visiting our grandparents) as unaccompanied minors. Our first flight from Providence was almost a disaster, when we nearly missed our flight because of some issue with two dorks (us) flying on their own. So when we got on that flight at the butt-crack of dawn, we relaxed for a moment, thinking nothing else could go wrong.
Boy, were we wrong.
When we got to Charlotte airport we were escorted to the next terminal, and we waited for about 20 minutes, and then we hear “cmon it got cancelled again!” That's right our flight to Georgetown got cancelled, and it was the only flight of the day! So that's when it hits us…we might have to stay alone overnight.
We were taken to the customer support office and we met this extremely nice lady Sally who helped us (and our mom) a lot. We were then faced with a choice: stay overnight at the "unaccompanied minors lounge”, or fly to Miami where our uncle would pick us up. If we stayed we would get to the Bahamas the next day. If we went to Miami, it would take two more days.
The “lounge” wasn’t really a lounge. It was kind of like the Big Bang Theory cafeteria mixed with a dentist waiting room, with couches that we had to sleep on. It was not comfortable. Do not recommend. (We didnt take any pictures other than this selfie, so we made an AI picture of what the “lounge” kind of looked like).
But our misfortunes continued. I had a cold, so with all the pressure changes on the plane, my eye felt like it was going to explode from sinus pressure. I couldn’t get Advil because my mom had to send a consent form, and by the time it got to them, I was already asleep.
The next morning, my sinus pressure was gone. We got breakfast at Cinnabon because there weren’t any good breakfast options. Then we waited in the terminal and got on our second flight. Everything was going fine until we were about three-quarters of the way there… and then we had to turn around because of a mechanical issue.
At that point, I really wanted to flip out.
After about half an hour of waiting in the terminal (and finally getting some Advil), we boarded our third flight. And this time we actually made it!
After we landed we rushed through customs and our mom met us. We got in a cab back to Barreterre. Once we arrived at the government dock, we threw on our foul weather gear and we hopped on our dinghy for a wet ride back to Nanook.
We learned some import lessons over these 38 hours. The biggest is to always have a good attitude. Second is to keep an eye out for one another. Third is that no matter how bad you think you have it, it could always be worse, so choose to be thankful. And the last, is to always have money to buy Lego (we bought a Porsche 911 GT3RS at the lego store in the airport to kill some time).
Thanks for reading my story.
Bye!
-Ben
