It all started last night where I sent a tx just fine and then attempted to do another and then the transaction sat at unconfirmed w/ 6 nodes eventually it moved to the dreaded 0/unconfirmed, in memory pool. The TX fee was high as well. So I ended up getting impatient and after doing a little research I ran the really fun process of -zapwallet  . I was happy, the tx cleared and I felt I was good to go. Today I decided to attempt to send to that same address and then it happens again, even though I used the recommended tx fee to max. So that new transaction did the same thing to me, and again I ran a -zapwallet, but this time the tx didn't clear and its just sitting at Status: 0/unconfirmed, in memory pool. I have also tried renaming mempool.dat to attempt to clear cache and that will not work either. Should I just wait 72 hours and why could I potentially be seeing so many failures? Turned off Firewall just in case it didn't like update to 0.14

Will running -mempoolexpiry= or -maxo potentially speed the process up of this transaction returning back to me or confirming? And what could be causing all these failures even though I am putting these tx to max fee

 I am using Bitcoin Core and these are the tx's that will not clear no matter what I do.

Tx#1

Date: 5/27/2017 17:02
To:
Debit: -0.50000000 BTC
Transaction fee: -0.00180637 BTC
Net amount: -0.50180637 BTC
Transaction ID: 15dca08c2a71c72adf24b0a36c13f0bae54f6964e940d50ab30143ef7515d396
Transaction total size: 521 bytes
Output index: 1

Tx#2

Status: 0/unconfirmed, in memory pool
Date: 5/27/2017 16:07
To:
Debit: -0.50000000 BTC
Transaction fee: -0.00216402 BTC 00            ----
Net amount: -0.50216402 BTC
Transaction ID: 65347cb71a795b61ef50e296957ad64c6325fb4caa681403c9f4baa17a0a9551
Transaction total size: 373 bytes
Output index: 1

PS. Could I potentially be connecting to a bad node that is somehow causing this backup for me???