Of all the traveling I've done these past 12 months (and there's been a lot of it--I've racked up more than 17,000 frequent-flyer miles since January), I think today's was the suckiest. My day started off badly when my limousine driver called me at a quarter to six this morning to say he was downstairs waiting for me. I was just about to step into the shower. (Fortunately, I'd gotten up a little earlier than I'd planned on, and was mostly ready.)
That little contretemps over, we had an uneventful trip in to the airport, which was jam-packed. I haven't had to wait in line that long even to go to Paris this summer. (And why is it, I wonder, that I always seem to wind up in line behind groups of the most clueless travelers in the universe--people who can't find their boarding passes, don't notice that there are six open kiosks waiting--and 100 impatient people behind them--and so on?). It was far too warm in the airport, and the seating area at my gate was jammed. As was the plane to Denver.
We boarded on time, and I found myself in what was supposed to be a window seat. The notable thing about the seat was its complete lack of a window. Instead, I had a bulkhead where the window should have been. Instead of having the recess where the window should have been, this bulkhead stuck out about four inches, making it very inconvenient for my left shoulder. My right shoulder was inconvenienced by the left shoulder of the gentleman seated in the middle seat, which made for a very uncomfortable flight for yours truly. That discomfort was not helped any by the fact that after we pushed back from the gate and taxied for 15 minutes, we spent another half-hour in a holding circle while they tried to download (or upload; I never could hear the captain's announcement clearly, despite having a speaker almost directly above my head) our weight balancing information.
That made me rather nervous, as I wasn't ending my travel day in Denver, only passing through on my way to Portland--and I had just under an hour to make my connection. My hope that we might make up some of the lost time in transit was quickly dashed. In fact, I think our flying time was longer than scheduled, because Denver was experiencing its first snowfall of the year. (More sleet-y and rainy than snow, but enough snow to stick to signage and trucks--and airplanes, about which more later.) The ceiling was so low that I couldn't make out the ground until we were about to land on it.
We taxied to what was supposed to be our gate, which of course was still occupied by the previous flight, since everything was backed up by the weather conditions and the deicing line. At that point, I had approximately 15 minutes before the scheduled departure of my flight to Portland, and I hadn't gotten off my plane from Chicago yet. I was resigning myself to having to miss the connection, and wondering whether, if I was going to have to be stranded in Denver, I might at least be able to catch the Avs at the Pepsi Center--which I wouldn't have been able to do, as they are even now playing the Wild at the Excel Energy Center in St. Paul--when they reassigned us to another gate down the line. That got my hopes up temporarily, until the captain came back onto the PA to say we were going to have to wait for someone to find his/her way down to our jetway to drive it out to the plane. (Hmm. Major airline hub. Check. Major traffic backup. Check. Inadequate personnel onsite to perform normal operating duties. Check.)
The door finally opened, and I finally managed to retrieve my jacket and my carry-on. They didn't bother reading us a list of connecting gates--just told us to find a departure screen and check for ourselves. (And yes, United will be hearing from me about this trip in just a bit.) Lo and behold, my Portland flight was just two gates down, and was still boarding. I power-walked to the proper gate and found they had only just started boarding the second seating--mine. So I slipped in line, found my seat, and sat down, breathing a mental prayer that this leg of the trip wouldn't be as bad as the previous one had been.
God seems to have gone fishing today, because that prayer wasn't answered, either. They held us at the gate for 20 minutes because there was such a backup from delayed flights and the deicing lines. That may have been a good thing, because I think that was also when they managed to load the luggage from the Chicago flight onto the Portland plane. Then we had to wait to be deiced. Long story short, we were an hour late taking off. I had no time for breakfast this morning, other than a carton of yogurt and an iced caffe mocha--and no time for lunch, either. So the two pitiful cookies they gave me on the Chicago-to-Denver leg and the pitiful bag of pitiful mini-pretzels they gave me on the Denver-to-Portland leg merely added insult to injury.
Took forever for my bag to come off, despite probably having been one of the last ones put on the plane--and the outside was wet. (Fortunately, nothing inside was, though the bag is now missing the zipper to one of its external pockets.) Whatever. I grabbed a cab for the five-mile ride to the hotel, thinking I'd zip in, check in, unpack, and zip out to look at the Japanese gardens. That five-mile trip from the airport to the hotel came to $32, with tip. For eight bucks more, I can get a taxi from O'Hare International Airport to downtown Chicago--a distance of 17 miles over a far more congested expressway system. Color me not pleased.
Anyway, I've arrived safely in Portland only a little the worse for wear, and I'm ensconced in my hotel room--where I may end up staying tonight. The friend I was going to meet for dinner is temporarily stranded in the Bay Area--lucky woman!--and my colleague apparently hasn't arrived yet. So I may order room service tonight and try to get some writing done. I had a couple of halfway decent ideas on my project for this semester's writing seminar during my lengthy sojourn on various airplanes today, so maybe I'll get something productive done today after all.
After I go complete the customer satisfaction survey for United.
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