It all started on Christmas Eve day around noon. It was such a beautiful day in Utah (nearly 50 degrees) that I almost didn't want to leave. When you go on a trip to a tropical destination you hope to be leaving behind miserably cold weather. Marci, Malina, Jenni, and Grandma picked me up at my house and took me to the airport. It was kind of ironic that Jenni was visiting Utah from Hawaii while I was going to be visiting Hawaii from Utah. Fortunately, she did get back to Hawaii before I left and we got to spend some time together.
I planned plenty of extra time at the airport because I was expecting Christmas Eve to be ridiculously crowded and understaffed. What I found was just the opposite. The airport was empty and I basically ended up spending an hour and a half sitting at the terminal and waiting for my flight to leave. You would think that I would have spent the time reading one of the 5 books that I brought along, but instead I did some writing on my laptop.
My flight had two scheduled stops. I had to switch planes and airlines in Las Vegas, and then again in San Francisco. The connection in Las Vegas was not terribly tight but enough so that I didn't want to waste a lot of time in between flights. When I got off the plane I talked to one of the gate agents to find out where my connecting gate was. It told him that I was on a U.S. Airways flight. It was actually a U.S. Airways flight that was operated by United and serviced by Ted... whatever the hell that means. Which of the 3 airlines was I actually supposed to go to?
I got routed to the opposite end of the airport. It was so far away that there was actually a tram that I needed to catch to get to the other terminal. When I got to the other terminal, I had no choice but to exit security to get to where I eventually needed to go. Of course, since I didn't have my boarding pass yet for my next flight this now meant that I needed to go to ticketing to get my boarding pass before going back through security.
I stopped at the U.S. Airways counter and was met with blank stares. They didn't know anything about the flight that I was on. After a couple of minutes of panick and confusion they eventually looked at my itinerary and noticed that it was a U.S. Airways flight operated by Ted so I needed to check in with them. When I got to the Ted counter, the lady started to freak out. Apparently my flight was already boarding and it was all the way on the other side of the airport that I had just come from. So, I had to run across the airport, take the tram, and then run through the terminal to make my connection to San Francisco. The interesting thing is that the gate that I left at was only two gates down from the one that I arrived at. Had the gate attendant not had his head up his ass, I could have saved a lot of trouble and running around.
Apparently I wasn't the only one that thought it would be a good idea to fly to Hawaii on Christmas Eve. The gate at the San Francisco airport was packed with people and they had overbooked the flight. Normally I would offer to get bumped, but I didn't want to make Tina come pick me up from the airport on Christmas day and besides I had gifts to deliver to the kids. Unfortunately, my seating assignment hadn't been made yet and I had to wait until everyone else was on the plane before I got my assignment. I was the second to the last person that actually got a seat on the flight.
Of course, being the second to the last person to get a seating assignment I got a choice seat directly in the middle of the plane blocked in by people on either side of me. I tried to sleep but couldn't. I thought about getting up to walk around to try and beat the Chlosterphobia but the people on either side of me were sleeping and I didn't want to wake them up. So, I just sat there. Slowly, but surely, losing my mind. Just when I thought that I couldn't take anymore, the pilots voice rang over the intercom that they were making their final descent into the Honolulu airport. Hallelujah!
After spending half an hour watching the luggage carousel spin endlessly and fruitlessly until no more pieces of luggage were being ejected from it's bowels, I got in line to speak with the United baggage people to figure out where the hell my luggage had disappeared to. Apparently I wasn't the only one who was missing luggage. There seemed to be an inordinate number of people looking for luggage considering the size of the flight that I had just come in on. When I finally made it to the front of the line, I discovered that my luggage was still sitting in San Francisco and would be delivered on the following day. They didn't tell me why the luggage didn't make it; just that it didn't.
Mom and Ernest picked me up from the airport. Apparently Ernest had been expecting me to call on my non-existant cell phone so they were rather late coming to pick me up. Fortunately, because of the debacle with my luggage the timing was perfect. They were just pulling up for the first (or maybe the second) time as I was coming out to meet them. I was greeted by hugs and a a beautiful lei. After getting Tina's address back to the United folks so that they could deliver my luggage the next day, we pressed on to Tina and Ernest's house in Mililani.
1 comment:
You should have visited us while you were in Vegas, especially since you had all that extra time.
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