The travel gods hate me. I don’t use the word “hate” lightly.

There were 12 of us scheduled to go to Miami. I being the “cruise director” of this trip, had decided weeks ago to leave first, and logically, get to Miami first.

Well, that didn’t happen. Not counting the people who were coming in the next day, I actually got there last. LAST!

The story is one that will quickly become legend.

I sleep a few precious hours on Wednesday, the night before I was to leave. I had to pack - for one of the fashion capital of the world - so it took a while. (My bag rang in at 52.5 pounds when I got to the airport.) As I lay down to sleep I kept thinking about what I was missing. It caused me to wake up about every half hour, all night long, before my phone woke me up at 8am to get ready for my 11:30am flight.

I get to the airport to see one of the largest lines I had EVER seen at an airport. I’ve flown a lot so I’m not exaggerating. It was flippin’ long. BUT…I didn’t need to wait in it.

“SCORE!,” I thought to myself. I went up to the e-ticket machine and fingered away. bzzzz bzzzz bzzzz went the printer. My tickets popped out.

That’s when my first wait of the day started. 20 minutes had gone by before the baggage woman yelled, “COLE?”

“That’s me!,” I exclaimed with a big smile on my face.

“Your flight is delayed. You’re going to miss your connecting flight. Go down to THAT line,” she said with some sort of weird satisfaction.

ONE AND A HALF hours into the line I decided to call American Airlines to see what they could do before I got to the ticket counter.

“Is there some weather problem there or something…everything seems delayed or cancelled,” said the very nice woman on the phone.

“Uh yeah.” The fog from Hades had decended on DC. It even grounded John Ashcroft and Andy Card!

“Well, I’m sorry to say I can only get you to Miami at 10:30pm,” she responded.

It was 12 hours away at this point, but I didn’t care. I would rather get there at 10:30pm - dinner time in Miami - than the other option of flying out the next morning at 7am.

I should have waited until 7am.

I finally made it up to the ticket counter after waiting 2 and 1/4 hours. My feet were killing me. I got my new tickets, checked my 52.5 pound suitcase, and headed to TGIF to grab a beer. I would be there late, but I would be there and this was cause to celebrate.

Five more people, including Drew (the birthday boy) and Shauna, were scheduled to go out at 4pm. They wanted to make sure they got checked in and settled so they got to the airport early. Shauna was the first to arrive and met me at Friday’s just as I got a table. Two beers later, we were both in better moods.

Then Nate - Drew’s roommate - called to say his flight out of Reagan wasn’t just delayed, but cancelled. They were now putting him on a flight out of BWI in Baltimore. That flight was subsequently ground because of fog for hours as well. He wouldn’t get to Miami until after 10pm.

Because of the change in my flight I would now be leaving only minutes before the five others (whose flight would go out ONLY 40 minutes delayed - WTF!). We got to sit around and chat before our flights - some jabba the hut looking woman farted really loudly and I almost wet myself - some kid was eating a sandwich and got mayo in a line across his face for about 20 minutes - it was good times.

They boarded their plane, I boarded mine. And then I sat there on the tarmac for one and a half hours.

You see, the fog had lifted, but I was flying to Laguardia in NY and they were having runway space issues. WTF?! It’s bad enough I was flying NORTH to get SOUTH, but now I had to sit on the plane on the tarmac for THREE times longer than the actual flight time. HA!

The delay would cause me to miss my connecting flight in Laguardia by 6 minutes.

I went up to speak with my 10th American Airlines associate of the day. (NOTE - none of them had been friendly and that’s not an exxageration) Without looking up at me once - except to check my ID - he rebooked me on the 9pm to Miami and told me to have a nice day. I thanked him.

Then I got up to the monitor to find that 1) the 9pm flight had been delayed until 10:25pm and 2) It was in a completely different terminal. You think he could have said something.

I walked up to a TSA security guard - who was soooo cute - and asked him if I needed to leave security in order to go to a different terminal. Yes. Really? Yes. And then he pointed me in the direction of Terminal D.

This is where it REALLY gets good.

I get in the short security line and think - well, I’ll get there while people are out drinking. This could still be good.

I take off my belt, my coat, and my shoes. I take out my laptop. I put it all on the x-ray belt. This little old (but plump) woman who didn’t speak any English was in front of me in line. She forgot to take her phone out of her pocket. She came back through and put it in a little bowl. We both got scanned and waited for our stuff to come out of the x-ray machine.

Enter the Jew. The Hasidic Jew. And his rice water and jelly.

I started to hear some yelling from just beyond the area me and this old lady were standing.

“Everyone needs to get out of the terminal now. NOW!”

Oh friggin’ great…what the hell is this?!?!?!

I learned, over the course of the 2+ hours I stood in the spot right between the security line and the terminal - i.e. at the x-ray belt - so much about airport security. How it works, who is responsible for what, and who needs to be called when something happens.

I was standing in that same spot for 2+ hours because I was in “the right place at the right time” the TSA agents told me. I had just gotten scanned and was in their line of sight when the “incident” occured and therefore didn’t need to evacuate. I would like to be sarcastic and quip “lucky me”, but as they evacuated the ENTIRE teminal - over 5,000 people including those working in the kitchens and people sitting on planes still attached to the boarding gates - I quickly learned I was, actually, lucky.

The incident.

Right before the old lady and I had gotten x-rayed and scanned this Hasidic Jewish family - a father, mother, and daughter - had caused a little scene. The father had gone through security and was in the terminal, but his wife who had the rice water and jelly started putting up a stink when she was told they were liquids and were not allowed on the plane. Seeing this the husband went back into the airport lobby by means of a CLOSED security lane and then came around to see his wife in the lane he had been scanned through. The TSA agents asked him to step back and not come through the scanner while the wife was putting on a scene.

While they dealt with the wife, the husband decided to leave that lane and go back around into the terminal once again through the CLOSED security lane he had just left.

UM….HELLO?!?! It’s one thing to walk out of security through a closed lane, but you’ve got to have a screw loose to think you can just waltz in a terminal through a CLOSED security lane.

The husband walked into the terminal and into the boarding gate area next to the security lane his wife and daughter were passing through.

TSA pounced. They did everything they were supposed to do. They saw the guy going through the closed lane and into the boarding gate area and they ran after him. Because no one could be certain he didn’t slip something - a box cutter, a weapon, a bomb - to anyone and because of the fact his wife and daughter were putting on a scene - perfect cover for him if he wanted to pass along something - they decided to do a “DUMP.”

A dump, in essence, is getting every single person in the terminal out, securing the terminal with bomb sniffing dogs, and re-scanning every single person for re-entry. But before the re-entry could commence each of the TSA agents who were witness to the incident needed to fill out a written and signed statement of what happened, the Port Authority Police Department (PAPD) needed to be called to secure the terminal, and the Federal Security Director (FSD) needed to make an appearance and declare everything was good to go.

To the agents’ credit they had 12 minutes to go before they were off for the night and because of the incident they would stay at work at least 4 hours over their shift. They were aware of this - and were not happy - but they said, “it’s part of the job. I would rather have this dump happen than live with the fact that something really bad happened.” Maybe I suffered from a little bit of Stockholm Syndrome, but I thought those TSA agents were professional and did a great job. And they let me and the old woman stay in the little security area instead of forcing us back out into the now 3 hours long security line.

In the course of the time I was standing there I also talked to the old woman’s son-in-law and explained to him in English (they were from Finland) what was going on. She was literally sweating for a while there because she thought she had done something wrong. Oh, and I managed to take this picture of the man who caused all the trouble.

The whole thing came down to a misunderstanding. According to the agents the airline was losing $25,000 a minute and at minimum the fine they would be giving this guy would be $25,000. By the end of the incident not only did the man and his family walk away without being assessed a fine, he was allowed to fly.

And whose flight do you think he was on…? You guessed it…mine! Because of him that was now delayed until 11:30pm. And just because karma has a big ol’ sense of humor, he was sitting right behind me.

I’m not kidding you when I say I had a nightmare while dozing on that flight of this man taking a piece of wire a choking me.

The flight landed at I don’t even care o’clock. Surpisingly, my luggage was there and intact. Oddly, it was wet but I wasn’t about to ask questions. I picked it up and rolled it out to the taxi line.

I jumped in the first available taxi - operated by what seemed to be a nice Jamaican women - and said, “The Colony on Ocean Drive, please!” I was finally going to get to South Beach. I was exhausted, yet still excited.

My cab driver fell asleep while driving me to the hotel. Twice. The first time was on the highway. We went from 70 mph to 40 mph. At first I was confused as to why - there didn’t seem to be traffic. Then I looked up in the rear view mirror and saw her eyes shut. When her head dropped it woke her up and the jolt caused us to almost cut off a Lexus. I was in Miss Cleo’s cab ride from hell.

After 18 hours of travel I was NOT about to die on the way to the hotel. I started asking her questions, pointing to things. It worked at first, but soon she started ignoring my questions. I saw the “Miami Beach 4 Miles” sign and sighed.

After a few more close calls we turned on to Ocean Drive. And then she fell asleep again. I saw her eyes close as we passed my hotel.

“We’re passing it. We’re PASSING it. WE’RE PASSING IT!!!!!” She finally got what I was trying to say - i.e. she woke up - and stopped.

By the time I got upstairs to the room it was 3:41 in the morning. Honestly, I wanted to cry. But everyone was sleeping and I didn’t want to be a drama queen. I quickly got changed and jumped into bed. And then I layed awake for about 45 minutes trying to decompress. I felt like I had been awake for 3 days in a row and I knew the next day would be a big one.