It was with great anticipation that the family and I boarded our 6 AM flight from Traverse City with our final destination being Puerto Vallarta and a connecting flight in Detroit. And after our travels, this was our exotic hotel for the night:
That, my friends, is the Sheraton Detroit Metro Airport in beautiful Romulus, Michigan. Not Puerto Vallarta. You can tell it's Michigan because it's gray outside. And Romulus is where we spent the first day of our 11-day vacation.
Our Delta flight left the gate in Traverse City on time. The rain of the night before had turned to snow, about three inches worth, and the plane needed to be deiced. The process began and then stopped. The captain explained that the deicing truck ran out of fluid and needed to be refilled.
As an aside, why wasn't the truck full in the first place?
The refill process took a long time - 1,000 gallons is a lot. And then the truck had to wait until the fluid was heated to the right temperature. And then it eventually returned to complete the deicing process. I can't confirm this next part, but a passenger on the other side of the plane said that they deiced another plane after refilling ours. Perhaps United or American pays more airport fees, or perhaps they figured we were already screwed.
Almost three hours later, our flight left Traverse City for Detroit. Our flight to Mexico had already left before we departed Traverse City and there were no flights to Puerto Vallarta for the rest of the day - it was Spring Break after all. We were booked on a flight the next morning, ate lunch and lounged in the Delta lounge, and spent the night in a hotel on Merriman Road. That day qualified as the most boring vacation day I ever spent.
Cherry Capital Airport is expanding and getting a new terminal. I would suggest that some of the money be used to buy an additional deicing truck. On our return flight from Detroit to TC, I chatted with a guy in line who said the same thing happened to him a few weeks earlier on a different flight. Yeah, another truck would be a big help.