Daria Saville had a dream week at the Merida Open Akron, reaching her first WTA 500-level semifinal in seven years, but she soon was embroiled in a travel nightmare as she raced to the starting line for her first-round qualifying match at the BNP Paribas Open.
In getting from Merida, the largest city in southeastern Mexico, over to her next tournament in Palm Springs, Calif. on the west coast, the Aussie revealed that “everything that could’ve gone wrong, did” in a harrowing recap on Instagram.
First, Saville wrote on Tuesday, her scheduled Sunday flight from Merida to Dallas was subject to a three-hour delay, meaning she would’ve missed her connecting flight on to Palm Springs. Not willing to risk it, she canceled that flight, and instead, booked last-minute tickets on a west-bound flight from Merida to Leon with the low-cost Mexican airline Viva Aerobus, which would’ve put her onto what she described as a “fly-through” to Tijuana.
But two hours later, she arrived in Leon, in central Mexico, to find the airport closed due to local curfew, and her next flight canceled.
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