$900 cab ride gets Elmont family home during blizzard

What began as a Florida vacation to Disney World for an Elmont family ended in a frenzied rush to get back to New York — despite last week’s record-breaking blizzard — and a $900 cab ride.

An 11-year Elmont resident, Emilian Emeagwali, and her five children spent the week before Christmas in Orlando, and were preparing to leave on Dec. 26 when they discovered that their flight to John F. Kennedy International Airport had been canceled due to the massive snowstorm that was in full swing.

Emeagwali took her family to Orlando International Airport anyway, arriving at around 12:30 p.m. — six hours before their canceled flight had been scheduled to depart. “They said no flights were going out, so I asked for a hotel accommodation,” recounted Emeagwali, who owns a physical therapy practice in Valley Stream and is originally from Nigeria. “I could not stay in the airport for three days. But they said no because it was not their fault,” she said. “I then called Disney to ask them for an accommodation, and they said no, so we were frustrated, and I started looking for other airlines.”

Emeagwali — who was chaperoning her children on her own because her husband did not make the trip — eventually found a flight to Buffalo on JetBlue Airlines and decided to book it, at a total cost of $1,600 for her family.

She planned to take public transportation to Long Island once they arrived in Buffalo, but when they got there she could not find any buses or trains leaving the city. So she loaded her children and all of their bags into a cab and headed for a hotel.

On the way there, Emeagwali said, she asked the cab driver how much it would be to drive her all the way to Elmont, and when he told her $1,100, she decided they would stay in the hotel.

Until she caught sight of it. “The hotel that he took us to was so bad, we didn’t even want to get out of the car,” she said. “I told him, ‘No, take us to a nicer hotel.’ We were desperate, but not to that extent. He then gave us the $900 price, and he wouldn’t go down.”

Her desperation growing, Emeagwali decided that the $900 cab ride would be the best choice. “I told him, ‘Let’s go,’” she said. “Listening to the news, I could see we could have still been in Florida [a week later]. Some people were stuck, and the airlines were telling them [they would not fly out] until the new year.”

After nearly 13 hours of driving in the wind and wet snow, Emeagwali and her children arrived at home at around 10 a.m. on Dec. 27.

“I am so happy,” she said. “I consider $900 not a huge amount of money, considering what was at stake for me if I hadn’t come back to New York. If I had waited, the conditions would have been bad.”

Her patients were the main reason she urgently needed to come back to New York, she explained. “I told them I was coming back by Monday,” she said.

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