9/29/11
After a beautiful sunrise and a painless checkout, I met with Spyros and got to the airport. This was a day of quite a few airport-related firsts, including admission into the Delta lounge at the Athens airport. They had coffee, pastries, and mini ice creams (and a lot more besides) and it was pretty neat to see, since you’d have to have flown way more than I have to consistently get in. Our flight was a little delayed (air traffic wasn’t officially striking, but doing a “white strike”, where they just drag their feet and take the maximum amount of time to do anything) but it was fine. I read some of my book, started editing my photos on my computer until the battery ran out, and tried to sleep – pretty standard. But once we landed, I discovered that traveling with Spyros is awesome for more reasons than lounge admission – a person carrying a sign with his name on it met us after we deplaned, and help us cut through not just the line to get to customs, but the customs line itself. This easily saved us an hour or more of standing around. Plus, my checked bag had priority status! So that went well.
The JFK lounge was way more crowded, and had fewer pastries, but it was still pretty cool. But then everything went to hell in a handbasket, so to speak. First the flight to PIT was delayed a bit. Then they said they had mechanical problems, but boarded us after that so I figured it was fixed. Not so. After an hour and change on the plane (like flying to Pittsburgh, but with no movement!), the pilot declared the plane unsatisfactory. So they canceled that flight, and some freak weather thing canceled the last Delta flight after that. Then, of course, there was mass rebooking chaos – if you have several attendants on two phones at once, you are doing something wrong. And Delta, it seems, was doing everything wrong. Finally (way longer than I had expected Spyros to have to wait, really) we were booked on an 8am flight out, and with a hotel booked. Except the hotel was way out in the boonies, and the voucher said Holiday Inn (great, I get points!), but when we got there, they told us nobody booked with them, and that our tickets are actually for the Rockville Inn across the street. Rockville didn’t want to take our vouchers with the wrong hotel name on them, though, so we sat around and waited some more (and also for an ordered pizza, because the food vouchers we received weren’t helpful at a hotel at 11pm when they don’t have a restaurant). Finally, around midnight, we got a room, in which I would probably spend four hours sleeping before it was taxi time again.
I was impressed by Delta’s twitter account, however – I had complained about the situation, and they gave me a $50 voucher good towards any flight, fees, or whatever for the next year. Social networking hooray! This will probably go towards a trip to Ecuador, if I do another before September (which is likely).
9/30/11
Shower and back into the same clothes time, what fun. I’m now kind of a biohazard when I take off my shoes to go through security, but not exactly what the TSA are looking for. Also, whatever taxi company accepts Delta vouchers is the rudest I’ve ever had to deal with, but we got to the airport without much fuss. Before the flight we had three $10 and three $6 vouchers ($48!) to burn in food, so we had a fancy sit-down breakfast. Woo French toast and fruit! Also I stole the little jars of maple syrup (you never know), and spent $12 in vouchers on three dark chocolate toblerones (with Spyros’ full support, hehe. Plus he had some still for his flight this afternoon!). Finally we boarded and took off towards home! I sat next to a IBMer about my age who works on food systems and we had a delightful chat about live, Elizabeth Warren being a rockstar, and other things.
By the time we landed, Spyros was kind of sweating the trip to CMU, since he technically had a presentation to give to the first-years at 10:30am and wasn’t sure if he had been switched to 11:30 as he had requested the previous night. So Spyros got the car, I got the bags, and I made a bunch of calls while he drove to confirm the pres had indeed been switched. Everything was a success, and Spyros was kind enough to let me take his rental to the apartment briefly. He has to drive back to the airport to get to Orlando today so I had three hours to go home, freshen, launder, eat, and then I needed to come back briefly to make some arrangements for next week anyway. Also SWE was doing a tour of the nearby power plant that I wanted to attend, so I did that as well, although given my sleep level I was probably functionally drunk at that point. No matter! Except I killed or found husks of about seven roaches in the apartment, of varying sizes. Electric bug zapper racket purchase: justified. Nerves: shot. But I made it through the travel marathon, and after a bit of tiny packing prep for tomorrow’s Orlando flight (all I could manage) I slept for a really long time.
No comments:
Post a Comment