Puerto Vallarta, Mexico -- OR NOT
So here's the story about our trip to & from hell. This trip was scheduled before we moved from Colorado to Utah. We were to fly with a couple friends from Colorado Springs on a charter flight from Denver International Airport (DIA) at 6am on a Saturday in late October 1997. We moved to Utah just a week prior, so we had bought tickets on Delta to fly from Salt Lake to Denver on Friday evening. Then we were all four going to stay at an off-airport hotel the night before the flight, spend a week in PV, fly back and go home.
We flew into DIA in a blizzard; this is what we saw while we were waiting for the hotel shuttle: 
. And of course we had packed for Mexico, so we only had light jackets. Finally the bus picked us up, and this is what we saw during the 1-hour drive on Pena Blvd to the hotel: . We checked in and waited for our friends to arrive from Colorado Springs; finally gave up and we went to bed. What is normally a 75-minute drive up I-25 took them almost 5 harrowing hours in the blizzard, and they showed up around midnight. Having decided to take the shuttle early to the airport in order to prepare for an international flight, we set a wake-up call for 3 a.m.; here's what we saw then: 
. But of course the storm had dumped a couple feet of snow on Denver; the shuttle was not going to run, and our flight got "postponed". Boom, there went all our plans. We went back to sleep.
When morning broke, we found that the entire city of Denver had been shut down. By midmorning, our flight had been completely cancelled, with the next charter flight being on Thursday. No travel on the roads was allowed except for emergency vehicles. The hotel employees, having never gone home, were doing their best to serve several hundred disgruntled travellers. The convenience store next door eventually ran out of food and beverages and closed. The hotel was running out of supplies. By mid-afternoon the main highways had been cleared, but only within the metro area, so our friends couldn't return to Colorado Springs. There is a place called Monument Hill on I-25 toward Colorado Springs, that was reporting over 4 feet of snow . So I called up my buddy Paul, who lives in the foothills on the west side of Denver and asked if the four of us could stay with them if we could get there. We loaded all our gear into the Accord, splashed around in the slushy parking lot pushing various cars around, and finally crept across the city toward the mountains.
Now get this: "officially", the airport never closed -- just the road to it (Pena Blvd). Some flights actually flew in and out during the day, which worked for those travelers flying United (DIA is their hub) and some flight crews. But the Denver Broncos were scheduled to play in Buffalo on Sunday, so the big story on the news all afternoon was how they managed to gather most of the team from their homes in the city, using snowmobiles and Hummers, and got their bus (with private snowplows?) on a back road into the airport to catch a charter plane, and how they arrived in Buffalo very late Saturday night. I'm sure the citizens of Denver were happy about it, but it really rubbed us travelers the wrong way.
Meanwhile, Paul and his wife finished their 24-hour shifts at their hospital and drove west to meet us at their highway exit. Which is just as well, because we got our car stuck a half-mile off the exit. After a lot of work, we got it back to the overpass, where we parked it in the snowy space where they'd been parked all day. Shuttled up the hill to his house, had a great feast, called it a day. On Sunday, we got up to find that the road to Colorado Springs was still closed, as well as the airport. So we shoveled a 1-car-wide trough up the driveway (2-1/2 feet deep), played in the snow, feasted again, and worried about how we were going to get home. Finally in the afternoon, I-25 finally opened, so our friends drove us all back down to the overpass to get the car. And there it was: gone. The state patrol had towed it, because it was blocking snowplows (the same ones that had no problem going around it 24 hours earlier). So we found the impound lot, ransomed the car, and our Colorado Springs friends took off to try to beat the next storm home, and Paul drove us to DIA. We had arranged seats on a flight back to Salt Lake, but it was cancelled by the time we got there.
Everything in the airport was a mess. People had been living there for 2 days, eating anything they could find. The Delta frequent-fliers club was trashed, there were no employees at all around, and anyone who wanted a drink just went to the bar and made one. Grungy folks were sacked out all over the place. We spent many hours there, or standing in line down at the counter, to get tickets for whatever flight we could. Finally Delta created a flight out of thin air to Salt Lake (their own hub); apparently they had a plane and crew with nowhere else to go, and plenty of passengers who could transfer out of Salt Lake to wherever they needed to go. About 11:30pm they loaded us on the plane, but in reality they had no intention of leaving then. They turned up the heat, we succumbed to exhaustion and all took naps, they loaded freight and mail, we made jokes about the tugs trying to push the plane through the snow drifts (you could hear the tires spinning). Finally we left after 2 in the morning and flew to Salt Lake. We pulled into our garage at 4 am, Monday morning -- I don't recall any snow in Salt Lake -- threw all our Mexican vacation gear on the floor, slept for 3 hours, and proceeded to go to work that week instead of playing in the Baja sun. Boo!!
But I do want to thank my Denver friend Paul (a.k.a. Raul, one of Da Boys) and his surprisingly patient wife for their wonderful hospitality. We ate them out of house and home, but they really were wonderful hosts for us 4 unexpected guests (2 of whom they'd never even met before). Thanks, Paul!
The following pictures are of snow drifts around the hotel. The storm blew straight out of the north, but the building had alot of odd angles, so it made for some interesting shapes. Of course, that meant that the snow depth ranged from 0 to 10 feet deep.
