Travel Adventures

I finished up in LA quicker than my planed Wednesday departure, so I decided to try and get out of town earlier. Before making a final decision I checked the Alaska Air Website and discovered that there were seats available on all of the afternoon flights out of LAX. If you have ever flown out of LAX to Seattle, you may have noticed that there is a flight an hour between 3 PM and 10 PM, so I felt my chances of getting home on Standby were pretty good.

Little did I know the 11:30 AM flight was going to be canceled due to mechanical difficulties. Because of this standby was not going to be an option. So when I arrived at the airport at 1 PM, I was forced to pay a change fee to get a seat on the 5:30 flight. I was only able to do this much because of my MVP status with Alaska Air. Without this I would have had to get tickets on the 8:30 PM flight.

Well I found a quiet little corner of the airport and played a little Final Fantasy III on the DS while I listening to Stephen King's Cell on my iPod. After a bit I noticed that my battery was running out on the DS, so I went hunting for an outlet. While looking to find an unused outlet I noticed that my 5:30 flight had now been delayed until 7:00. I decided to play it safe and check with customer service. They told me that the plane was having mechanical problems in Seattle and had not even left yet. He put me on the Standby list for the 7:20 flight because there was no way I was going to get on the 6:40 flight.

So at 7:00 PM I am waiting for them to call my name off the standby list when I notice that there is no plane at the gate. Since they are supposed to be boarding this is not a good sign. It turns out this was supposed to be the second flight out for the plane that was canceled this morning. The good news was the plane was fixed. The bad news was they were having problems getting the plane moved to the gate. At about 8 PM they call out a bunch of names off the standby list. Mine was not on the list. So I am hovering by the desk waiting for the next batch when I here my name over the PA telling me to go to gate 33B for a seat assignment. I push myself through the crowd at 32, to stand in line at 33B. After about 10 minutes I get to the front of the line and they have no idea why they would have paged me to go to that desk since they were going to Vancouver, she suggested I try gate 34 since it was going to Seattle. This was of course the 8:30 flight that I would have gotten tickets on if I had not been an MVP.

I get over there when I over hear them say to grab the next names off the standby list since no one showed up. I quickly speak up that I had gone to Gate 33B like the message had said. She turns around and looks where she was and says "Opps". So I did get a seat on the plane. It was a middle seat... Next to a crying infant... Whose mother did not speak English and did not understand that the area underneath the seat in front of me was for MY carry-on luggage... Next to a smelly old lady... That had never learned that if I have my headphones on it is because I don't want to talk about your vegetable garden...

Well I made it home without killing anyone. I even had 35 minutes to spare until being forced to say that I came home on Tuesday.