Looking Back : Crazy Christmas Travels

I arrived to Dallas late on Thursday, December 17th.  It was, again, a crazy travel experience.  Not quite as crazy as last year, but more crazy than I'd prefer.  I was scheduled to fly out of Newark and 1 train stop away from the airport, I realized I had an email, so I opened it.  It was from American saying that my flight had been rescheduled to the following evening...24 hours later!  It was the oddest email ever - no explanation at all and it was almost like a confirmation of a request I had made, but I obviously hadn't made any such request.  Since I was only 1 stop away, I kept on and went on to the airport.  Newark was a ghost town - it was like they were shutting down for the night.  At the American counter, they were packing up to go - they informed me that my flight had been canceled and there were no more American flights to anywhere that night.  I don't know for sure, but I highly suspect that my flight was canceled because it was not full.  That makes me angry.  And I felt like the situation was handled pretty poorly with the timing and wording of the email and the fact that they thought it was no big deal to reschedule me for 24 hours later.  So, I complained and then told them they could do better than that.  They tried to tell me that there were no flights I could get on before that, but I kept telling them that there must be, that they could do better, and then started offering up ideas...another aiport in NYC?  Another airline?  ANYthing...there has got to be something.  Finally, they succombed and got on the computer and realized that, oh yeah, they had a flight out first thing the next morning I could get on.  Oh, and wait, if I left right now, I might make a flight out that night from LaGuardia.  Did I have bags to check?  Yes, of course I did.  They weren't sure I could make it to LaGuardia in time to check bags.  I debated, if it was worth trying to get there and decided to go for it...after telling them that they WOULD pay for my taxi fair.   LaGuardia and Newark are pretty far from each other and I have never had a reason to do a drive from New Jersey to Queens, so I had no idea how long it would take, expected there to be traffic, and figured we'd be driving into Manhattan and back out to Queens, both of which can be nightmares at any given time.  My taxi cab driver was awesome.  No traffic and he went around the bulk of Manhattan instead of through it.  It only took about 30 minutes.  Thankfully, American did foot that bill - it was an $85 cab ride!  I got to LaGuardia in enough time to even sit down and have dinner before I went through security and I was only an hour later into Dallas than my original flight would have been.  The new flight was not full, so I had extra seats to spread out in and it was a smooth flight from there.  Pretty crazy getting to that point, but not so bad after all.