Alex and Tracey Martinez, a nurse and teacher from Mandeville, just visited their daughter who is teaching English in Madrid. They visited Barcelona and Paris too. "We took kind of a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe this summer," the couple said. Heading home, they flew from Germany to Newark Sunday. They had a United flight from Newark to New Orleans scheduled for that night. "It was delayed and delayed and it eventually got canceled," Tracey Martinez said.They snagged the next available United flight out which was Wednesday morning but that was canceled too. Now they are scheduled to fly back home Saturday. "We have not been able to get in touch with United in any fashion unless we were willing to stand in a physical line for several hours or wait on hold for several hours," Alex Martinez said. They are stuck in New York without their checked bags, spending $1,200 on hotels alone. "There's no rental cars available," they said. "There's no train available. We're kind of stuck." They are not alone. Across the country, there have been 33,000 flight delays and nearly 6,300 cancellations from Saturday to Tuesday, according to Flight Aware. The FAA grounded flights due to severe storms and the chaos was made worse by short staffing with the FAA. United said more than 150,000 of its customers were impacted and the airline CEO said in a note, 'The FAA frankly failed us this weekend.’