I managed to get a flight to Atlanta late Thursday. The Atlanta American Airlines desk closed at 8:30, so I spent an hour on the phone trying to arrange flights. From Atlanta I flew to Seattle, and eventually got a flight home - essentially zigzagging across the country.
I was not impressed with American Airlines. They told me at 2PM on Thursday that the Savannah airport was closed, and I believed them ... but the flight I took left at 8:30PM. AA should not have lied to me. The manager gave me his business card and told me he had reserved rooms in a nearby hotel, but I would have to pay the cost. When I got there, I was put in a room that smelled of stale smoke and urine for $129/night. I requested another room. That one only smelled of stale smoke. I again requested another room, and was finally in a room that didn't smell.
For no particular reason, I decided to walk to the parking lot - not sure why. Even as I was walking there I wondered what I was doing, but I kept going. In the parking lot I met a man who told me that he had received a notice under the door an hour earlier that the hotel was being evacuated. I had not received the notice, so I went back to the front desk to ask about it. It was true - they had omitted telling me that they were being evacuated at the time that they registered me. That is when I requested that they cancel the cost of the room, and that the shuttle take me back to the airport. I was thinking that I could take a cab to the Civic Center and evacuate to Augusta. At the airport, I noticed people at the Delta check-in and that's when I learned that the airport was not closed, and there was a flight out. What an ordeal!
