WPT Battle for the Season Pass III - Day 1
First, my apologizes to the people who have been checking here for updates. It was a hectic first day or two, but things are settling down.
On Saturday, Ray and I conducted a charity poker tournament for Berkshire Poker, which benefited The Dalton Lions Club. That went fairly well, and after getting everything broken down, I went home to pack. The past two years, the Battle for the Season Pass was held in the Bahamas. This year, they were holding it in the Dominican Republic. After getting mostly packed, it was 1am. Donna and I had to leave to get to the airport by 4am. I decided that I might as well stay up. I would only be getting 2 hours of sleep.
When 3am rolled around, I woke Donna up, we loaded up, and off we went. We made it to Hartford by 6am (2 hours prior to an international flight) and had a long time to wait. Getting no sleep was starting to catch up to me. Our flight went from Hartford to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where we were supposed to board a smaller plane to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. We got a little late of a start from Hartford, and hence we arrived a little late in San Juan. The problem was that we only had a 30 minute layover in San Juan, and we were 20 minutes late.
As we got off the plane, we figured out where to go, then ran to the gate. As we were running, I saw two other people running in the same direction as well. I asked them if there were going to Punta Cana, and sure enough, they were. As we got to the gate, we saw that the door was closed and they would NOT let us on the flight even though there turned out to be FIVE of us from the Hartford flight that were going on to Punta Cana - and the airplane was STILL sitting out there.
We were directed to Customer Service where they politely said that there were not more flights to Punta Cana today. Great… I am stranded in the Caribbean on the WRONG island. After some research, they said that they were going to route us to a city called La Romana. Oh boy! We will then be on the correct island, but still in the wrong city. They then explained that they would put us on a bus that would take us to Punta Cana.
The five of us now had a 2-1/2 hour wait until our next flight. We were all hungry, so we found a restaurant and I had a BLT. At 4:30, we were in the air again and off we went. Upon arrival in La Romana we breezed through customs (they just looked at us, saw that we were tourists, and waved us through). Our next task was to find the American Airlines desk to arrange for a bus to Punta Cana. Well, let me tell you, this was an interestesting experience. Very few people there spoke English. It was “interesting” to be in a foreign country trying to communicate a problem when you do not know the language. After a few minutes, the person at the customer service desk went in the back and summoned a supervisor who spoke decent English. We we able to get the situation resolved and they put us on a van to the actual resort (and not just the Punta Cana airport as originally planned). The downside was that the ride was 2 hours long!!!
So, we got the scenic tour of the Dominican Republic. All I will say is that it was pretty eye-opening, and VERY interesting. After 2 hours of very nervous travelling, we finally arrived at the resort. We got checked in and made our way to our room, which was about a 5-10 minute walk to the other side of the complex.
Donna and I decided that we were hungry, so we ran to the buffet. They closed at 10pm, and we made it there just in time. I was exhausted - remember I was running on NO sleep from the night before. After dinner, we crashed (we did not even get the cell phones or internet card that we paid for - and hence why there was no update yesterday).
The neat thing about the travel fiasco is we made two very good friends from Northampton, MA!