We had just left our hero when she found out that she was stranded in Sydney, kicked out of her hotel room and no flight for a few more days. What was she to do?

Well, she still has her two friends. One of them was smart enough to have travel insurance! Everyone cheer for this other friend! Hooray! Caity and the other travel-insuranceless friend cling to friend number three and plan to sleep on her floor while she stays. They are still scared out of their wits. Why?

Well there’s always a catch. This girl is also trying to book a flight on another airline that is still flying with her travel insurance, too. So there’s a chance that this girl will be able to leave before Caity and her other friend. But maybe not!

We all slept in our own rooms for the last night and planned to meet up and discuss what was happening for the next three days in the morning.

We woke up and our travel insurance friend was gone.

We went down to the front desk, distraught, not knowing what to do. This hotel was $200 a night and we absolutely couldn’t afford that. We explained what had happened to the front desk manager and told him who we were and he told us that our friend had left an envelope for us at the front desk.

In the envelope we found that since she had left during the night and basically abandoned us, she had already booked the room for us and paid half of it, knowing that we would only have to split the rest and pay $50 each, hoping that we could manage that. She said hopfully that would buy us time and we could figure out what to do for the other days in the meantime.

Although that was still more than we had hoped to pay, we did each have $50 and it was a relief so we paid the hotel manager and put our things back in the hotel room and started putting our heads together to think about what the heck we could do.

• Obviously there were some cheaper hotels but to lug our things all the way across town (and also pay for transportation to get there and back to the airport) seemed to cost almost as much as just buying another room where we were plus there was all the effort and the whole “not knowing where the heck we are” thing.
• We thought about hostels which was actually recommended by one of my twitter friends (I love the internet) which was one of our best options.
• There was the 24 hour McDonalds at the airport which had free WiFi. We thought about just taking all our things there and buying coffee all night and staying there on the internet. Why not?
• Then there was the airport. You can sleep in the international terminal if you have a ticket in the next 24 hours which we would. Bingo. You have to do what you have to do.

So we thought we would weigh the options in our heads and go walk around Sydney a bit again. We needed more food since we’d be there for another couple days anyway and we needed to get out of the damn hotel. We weren’t walking for 5 minutes when we met another interesting person.

A guy about our age was walking our way and said hello to us. We said hi back and started talking to him. He said we were the nicest people he had seen all day. We noticed by his accent he wasn’t Australian. I could tell he was American or Canadian. It turned out he was from Canada. He asked where we were from and we told him where we were from in the States. It turned out that he was Mormon and he was over here doing his missionary work. We met up with his other friend and we told him our situation and his friend said that they should ask about us staying at their Church if we had nowhere to go. I thought that was so nice of them. They gave us their number just in case. So just by talking to people, it gave us another option.

We went back to the hotel again. I think this is when we finally decided that we should just give up and buy tickets on the right airline: Air New Zealand. They were the only airline that had been operating through this entire thing. Josh was willing to buy me a ticket and my friend found a way to get a ticket too. We ended up getting a ticket on the same plane a day earlier so we’d just have to figure out two more nights instead of three. We decided to sleep in the airport and suck it up.

We packed up and went to the airport and got ready to pack in for the long haul. Only 30-something hours until our flight. We decided to go ask Air New Zealand if we could get on standby for the same flight that day just in case. We had nothing to lose. Well, it was a good choice. Air New Zealand put us on standby that day and flew us out a day early. I wish we decided to go with Air New Zealand earlier and we could have gotten ourselves out of this mess.

The funny thing? I always fly with Air New Zealand but when I booked this time Air New Zealand was a few hundred dollars more expensive so I decided to try something new. Something in my gut said “NO, CAITY, NO! Air New Zealand is good! It is worth it! You love Air New Zealand!” And do you know what? I ended up paying that extra money anyway for that last leg of my journey which is the funniest thing. I am just upset that I felt it in my gut and I ignored it. You should never ignore a gut feeling.

Screw you, Virgin Australia/Pacific Blue. You stranded me in Sydney for five days, three of which you gave me no accomodation for (and who knows if my flight would’ve been delayed further – I didn’t stick around to find out). Air New Zealand has always been more than helpful every time I’ve flown with them and I can’t believe I strayed from them. Look where it got me. I’m always flying with Air New Zealand from now on. No matter what. I love you, Air New Zealand. Thank you for saving me from the Ash Cloud and finally reuniting me with me husband (even if I did end up being a few days late for my anniversary).

I would also like to thank my brother in law Luke and his awesome girlfriend Briar for coming to pick me up in the middle of the night and taking care of me since my husband had to go back to work in the south island. I love you guys.