I hate traveling I hate traveling I hate traveling.
Boo fail grr boo.
For the third time in a row, my PDX-SFO journey was Made of Fail. Got up nice and early this morning and left Nuevo Rancho Lake at 8:30. Jay and I hung around the airport a while till it was time for me to go to the gate…stupidly not checking the monitors. Doh!
At the gate, the sign said the flight was 40 minutes late. Sigh.
By the time I’d managed to convince my phone to speak to the airport’s wireless, they announced we were now going to be 90 minutes late. (You know, 90 minutes–the length of the flight itself.) Apparently they are doing construction at SFO and are only using one runway today.
As in, something they knew about in advance. Something that, oh, could have been on the website when I checked in for the flight.
Anyway…bought a bottle of water and a bag of Cheetos for my lunch (travel fail = Cheetos lunch–one must be kind to oneself), called my mom (thereby saving that time on the other end), argued with the airport wireless again for a while, read, etc.
And they kept changing the departure time…earlier, later, earlier, later. At one point, we actually started boarding–first class and Super Gold Elite Pashas had boarded when word came through that we were staying in Portland another hour. Okay, everybody off.
Waiting waiting.
Finally we got on board a little after noon (for a 10:15 flight), went through the paces, closed the doors, went and sat on the runway for a while. Including turning the engines back off.
Sigh.
The plane was entirely packed, with angry cranky nervous people who were missing their connections minute by minute. Or maybe not! But who knew?
Finally we took off…and finally we landed at 2:35.
SFO looked like a refugee camp. You know how during the holidays, there’s weather somewhere, and everybody gets stranded, and the news runs those pictures of all the monitors showing “Delayed” and “Canceled” and all the people lying around on their luggage and swarming the ticket agents? Like that. It looked just like that. Why in the world don’t they change the schedules when they close a runway? Do they somehow think it’s going to work??? Does anybody know what they’re doing? For serious: at least 3/4 of the flights were delayed.
Got to my car. Because of the delay, parking bumped up into a third day and therefore cost more.
Got on the freeway. Mind-blowing traffic just past Candlestick!
After all that, I totally expected parking fail…but I found a place right around the corner. I guess parking fail will come when I get back with groceries in a little while. 🙂
Anyway–total elapsed time, door to door: 7 hours 10 minutes. Dudes, that’s approaching “it would be faster to drive” territory. I’m just saying. I hate hate hate travel.
So why do I keep doing it? See cheerful post to follow.