Delayed

Hey guys, it's me! (Well duh, who else would it be?) Yep, I'm hanging out at the SARSiL's house while she and the Mrs. are off doing girly things like manicures, and her place is laptop-equipped and wifi-enabled.

I have to tell you about our travel experience yesterday, definitely not one of my better ones. Way back more than 20 years ago, I missed a connecting flight while on my way to Florida for Christmas because the plane for the first leg of the flight was late getting into Logan due to bad weather. In that instance, when we arrived in Philadelphia, already knowing we weren't going any further that night, the guy ahead of me in line made such a stink about getting a free ticket to compensate for his inconvenience (it got to the point where he was literally standing there going "I WANT A FREE TICKET! I WANT A FREE TICKET!" like a damn five-year-old throwing a tantrum) that I was able to simply coast on his ranting and get one also.

Yesterday's situation wasn't quite that bad. The Mrs. always insists on getting to the airport insanely early, so we left the house via taxi at 6:30 AM for a 9:15 flight. It took less than 30 minutes to get to the airport, check in, and go through security, and I have to admit it was nice to have enough time to have a sit-down breakfast. After we'd been sitting at the gate a while, the gate attendant announced that they had to swap out the plane for a different one, which was going to cause a short delay. Oh, okay, haven't heard that one before. As we were watching them do that, we were told that our departure had been pushed back to 11 AM due to weather conditions on the west coast.

One of the things I hate most in this world is sitting around in an airport waiting to get on a plane, and I was already pretty cranky, having gotten only about four hours' sleep. But weather is weather. We moved to a seating area at another gate that was almost empty and thus quieter, and a little before 11 they boarded us. We taxied out and ended up sitting for another hour while everything out in the San Francisco area sorted itself out, and we finally took off a few minutes after noon.

The rest of the flight was nearly perfect--plenty of legroom, no screaming babies, snacks, no turbulence. I tried to sleep, but I was only able to drop off for a few minutes at a time here and there. (I've never been able to sleep on planes, except for one time when I was flying to New Orleans for Mardi Gras on a late-evening flight; the plane was less than half full, and since I was the only person sitting in my row I was able to lay on my side and doze.) Even the landing was one of the smoothest I've experienced.

Neither of us had ever flown into the San Francisco airport before; we usually fly into San Jose because it's closer to Santa Cruz, but JetBlue is currently not flying there nonstop from Boston (though supposedly they are going to reinstate those flights some time soon). The terminal at SFO is very large, and our gate was at the absolute opposite end of the long, long terminal from baggage claim. Then you get to go upstairs and ride an automated train around the airport to the car rental garage. And by "around" I mean ALL the way around; if the train had gone the other direction, I'm quite sure the rental garage would have been the first stop.

After we checked in at the rental counter, we had one more bit of silliness to deal with. A bunch of the rental companies are now under the same corporate umbrella, but they don't bother to mention this, so you go into the garage looking for your company's signage and find it's all different. We found a guy who explained to us that we were in fact in the right place, and when we got to the section for compact cars we found a situation very much like what happened to us in San Jose a couple of years ago: only two cars left, both kind of crappy, and one technically an "economy" class car. Even more strange, the facing row was for midsize cars, and one of them was the exact same model as the other car in the compact row. While we considered what to do, someone else came along and took that car.

We managed to find another employee (they seemed to be wandering around the garage at random) who told us that this company had done away with the economy class, which seems like a convenient excuse for why you're stuck driving a kleenex box when in fact they should just let you take one from the next class up. As we were preparing to load that car, another employee parked one just like it a few spaces away. The Mrs. went over to look at it to see if maybe it had power windows and door locks; it didn't, but she noticed a "no smoking car" sticker on the dashboard, which she deemed more important, so off we went in our Hyundai Accent. Whee.

Once we got out of the airport and onto the highway, I noticed that over 90 minutes had passed since we had landed. It was also still raining, not steadily but more like in sheets every few minutes, with just little sprinkles in between. Fortunately we are familiar with the Bay Area/Silicon Valley highways from previous visits, so while the driving was somewhat difficult, the rest of the trip was uneventful. I had quite a nice headache going by that point, but food and Tylenol and ten hours of sleep took care of it.