I’m visiting NYC again for the holidays! I’m not taking any days off from work, other than company observed holidays. Due to availability of reward travel dates (I booked this trip using my miles), I had to fly out in between work days. Red-eye FTW!

The thought of a long red-eye flight doesn’t really bother me. One of the best skills a traveler can have is to be able to pass out on an airplane and wake up just in time for landing.

I woke up the the sound of the pilot on the intercom. Fortunately, my headphones were at a moderate volume and I could hear his voice over my music. From what I caught from his announcement, a monitoring or alerting system had malfunctioned. He emphasized that this was not a safety risk, and that the only change was that they had to keep an eye on certain things more carefully than normal.

Then he said we were being turned around and going back to Phoenix, and it would take at least an hour to get there. What was odd was that we were not being sent to one of US Airways’ east coast hubs, Philadelphia or Charlotte. It seemed extremely inconvenient, making the red-eye even redder.

Fast-forwarding ahead, I landed almost 4 hours late in NYC, missing my Bolt bus reservation from NYC to Philadelphia (I was planning on co-working at IndyHall through Christmas). The back-up plan was to take a NJ Transit train to Trenton, NJ and transfer to a train to Philadelphia.

I arrived at Penn Station and immediately bought a ticket. After a few minutes of trying to find out where the schedules were posted, I discovered no trains had come in or gone out of Penn Station in over an hour. An Amtrak power failure had suspended all Amtrak and commuter rail traffic in and out of Penn Station.

At this point, I could have walked to a PATH station several blocks away to get to a NJ Transit station in New Jersey, but considering how much I was already striking out, transportation-wise, I finally gave up and decided to work in NYC for the day.

I ended up tracking down John Murch who was working from home and offered up his couch. I’ll finally get to add a post here on SJ for him soon!