Fans drive, make last minute changes to get to Glendale for the Fiesta Bowl

PHOENIX (3TV/CBS 5) - The Fiesta Bowl is just days away, but because of the Southwest Airlines fiasco, many TCU and Michigan fans are still figuring out ways to get to the Valley.

“We say that we bleed purple, like for real,” said David and Karly Bobo, die-hard TCU fans. They knew that they wanted to come to the Fiesta Bowl as soon as they heard TCU was in the running. “I had confidence that we were going to make it, and I really thought this was where we’d be at and I bought our tickets a long time ago and they weren’t that expensive compared to what they got to be,” they said.

But, like many others, their flights with southwest were canceled. “We looked at American out of Amarillo, and it was so expensive, and I was like there is no way I’m paying. It was ridiculously expensive for five people to fly at the last second there was no way we could do it,” said David. So they decided to make the best of the situation, a 10-hour road trip. “He was like trying to book a hotel, rental cars, so it was yesterday morning pretty early that we decided to drive. We figured we were going to do it,” said Karly.

But for Christopher Ortiz, it’s been a harder situation. His son is a senior at TCU and plays in the marching band. His original flight was set to arrive Friday morning, but it was canceled.

After hours of looking for flights, he says a miracle happened. “I just got off southwest.com and got a ticket from Austin tonight, to Phoenix. I don’t know what just happened. I’ve been on southwest.com all day, I was on it all late last night. I was even trying to check with all these different airlines,” said in a video posted to Twitter.

He told Arizona’s Family that his son has worked so hard to get here, and to not watch him perform on this big of a stage was breaking his heart. “Southwest just got availability and put on the last flight tonight. Now whether I get out that’s one thing, but it does show it’s available and I just got my seat number. I don’t have my gate yet,” he said.

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