my journey to the manhattan audition, part I

last night i returned from nyc where i was auditioning for the manhattan school of music. today, i will start to document my trip. while it's tempting to tell about the most recent happenings, i'm going to start from saturday morning and work to the present

so here goes...

Saturday
colin picks me up, about 20 minutes later than we planned, at 10:20a and we drive to the msp airport. we were going to make a stop for lunch at chipolte, but decided we were cutting it close enough and skipped out on burrito heavenness.

we parked off-site and took a shuttle to the aiport. when we got to the airport we navigated our way (it was complicated...) to the northwest airlines (who i will now refer to as nwa) counter. after entering all of my information into the automatic check in computer thing, it told me i needed to speak with a nwa representative behind the counter. i waited patiently and was eventually informed that our flight had been cancelled. our fully booked flight was cancelled? really? the dude tells us that we can take different flights and get there about an hour after we were scheduled. however, we can't be on the same flights because there's only one seat left on each flight. one of us has to fly to boston and make a connection and one has to fly to toronto and make a connection. so they book me to fly to boston and colin to toronto.

so we go through security...

colin gets through just fine. james' bags go through and the lady working the x-ray screams bagcheck as if the bomb i planted in my backpack was about to explode in 10 seconds. another lady comes to her aid, takes me backpack and asks me "is this yours" in an accusatory tone. i politely say "yes it is" and i follow her to the table where she proceeds to take out everything i had just carefully packed. after going through everything (i know it's her job, and i'm not mad about that) she says to me "there are lighters in here, where are they?" hmm...i don't smoke so i'd like to know where they are too... i tell her i have no idea, and she continues to look as if she didn't even hear what i had just said. she frustratingly gives up and decides that she's going to send everything i have in my backpack through the x-ray individually. after doing so she comes back, gives me all my stuff in a bin and says "you're good to go." i ask "did you find them?" she says, "no, you're good to go." i quickly re-pack my stuff, and hurry to my gate with 10 minutes to spare.

phew.

my flight left as scheduled and i got to boston in time to make my connection to nyc.

when the plane touched down i turned my phone on and listened to a voicemail colin had left me. his plan had made an emergency landing in detroit and it looked as though he was going to miss his connection in toronto. i'll spare the details of this whole thing because i believe colin is going to write about it in the next couple of days but basically, it involves him going through canadian and then us customs with no passport or birth certificate and eventually landing at la guardia around 11p where he then tries to board a bus to get him to the subway without a metro card and eventually ends up fronting a $30 cab fee. his rendition is more detailed and comical.

to sum up the travel, we paid nwa $267 for a non-stop flight from msp to jfk that left at 12:55 and arrived in nyc around 4. what we got was two seperate connecting flights that didn't get us to our destination until 11p.

no worries. we got there. however tired...and annoyed...we got there.

we got some chinese food and went to bed at about 2:30a.

to be continued...

james