Travel Advisory Warning
No, this isn’t a September 11th anniversary blog. It’s just an anecdote; although anecdotes by definition are short, and this almost qualifies as “novel” as far as blogs go. Sorry I haven’t updated in awhile … I will be more diligent now. School starts in just over a week and I’m pretty nervous but excited. Also, I’ve been working hard on another project which will launch next Friday. You’ll see a link then. On with the novel …
About a month ago, I went back to Austin to close out my lease. I am officially a non-resident of Austin now. In the first couple of days back, I spent the majority of it selling what was left of my possessions and packing what I wanted to keep to be shipped to my brother. The biggest item aside from my car that had yet to sell was my W Bed but I had a few prospective buyers. A day after I arrived, one of the prospects agreed to purchase the bed at asking price and came by to pick it up. I asked him if he used to work at Trilogy or if he had heard from a friend who did. Shockingly, he responded with neither. Apparently, he was researching W Beds online and coincidentally, happened upon my garage sale site on accident. I later went to Google and tried out a search of my own and sure enough, the site comes up very early in the search. Considering it had only been up two weeks at the time and was not really linked fro many site other than my own, I have to say I’m pretty impressed. I can now say I sold my bed with Google.
The stay in Austin itself, whilst interesting, was not the highlight nor lowlight of my trip. Getting to Austin was a different story and as the wise ones say, Getting There (in this case, Austin), is half the adventure. Permit me to entertain you with a a travel tale that surpasses even my past experiences.
I scheduled myself 2.5 hrs of time to catch my 10:30am flight at Gatwick airport. This window may seem too narrow and as it turned out, it was, but my logic was based on past experiences. I’ve ridden the express, it takes 30 minutes. It takes maybe 20mins for me to get to the express from my place so I’d get to Gatwick with over 1.5hrs … or so the theory went. I left my flat 15 mins later than I originally planned (1:25 left to check-in). The Gatwick “Express” seems to enjoy STOPPING an awful lot and took nearly twice the advertised time – 50mins (1:05 left). Then I forgot to consider that the Express actually arrives in the South Terminal so I had to take a shuttle to the North (0:55) and finally, the lineup, even for Club World, was exceedingly long and took 25mins. So there I was in front of the check-in counter 30mins before the flight. Needless to say, I wasn’t going to be let on.
Speaking to the ticket office, I tried to get myself on a later flight to Dallas or Houston, either from Heathrow or Gatwick. As it turned out, the only flight leaving anywhere near there that day that hadn’t already left was one heading to Atlanta. “Atlanta?” I thought, “I don’t need to go to Atlanta, I need TEXAS.”
10 minutes later, I’m on the phone with Kathryn and in full Road Warrior(tm) mode. I ask her to look at sabre BTS (our corporate travel site) to see if there were reasonable ATL->AUS flights, orbitz.com to try and find a better fare, ba.com to see when the LGW->ATL would arrive, back to sabre to try to book the fare, another look at sabre to try and cancel my current connection from DFW->AUS, and finally to e-vite to cancel the get-together I was hoping to have that evening. I’m not sure I would have made the flight if it wasn’t for her. I then return to the ticket sales to transfer my staff ticket over to the ATL flight … the flight is full with 40 oversold in economy and 25 oversold in Business and First. So I’m put on standby list that’s longer than their check-in lines but told I have a chance because my staff ticket gives me higher priority.
My next task was to cancel my DFW->AUS flight. Sabre didn’t seem to like me trying to cancel online (via Kat) 8 hours before the flight so I try to call our off-hours travel office but then realize I don’t have a number to call. I call a couple of co-workers and eventually, they help me sort it out. By the time I’m discussing the cancellation, I’ve discovered that I indeed did make the flight and my seat was in First (as opposed to Business where staff usually is). At last! My luck was turning around.
On the flight, I’m sitting in the centre and to my left is a man who’s upset because his wife is sitting across the aisle when they requested to be sitting next to each other. “If you like, I can switch with you,” I offered. “But your seat is broken,” he replies matter-of-factly. “Oh, of course. Right,” I say like it was entirely obvious to me. It wasn’t. Further inquiry told me that the seat wouldn’t recline, essentially rendering the first class seat a few notches less than first. Fortunately, they were able to manually adjust the seat somewhat such that I was able to mimic a flat.
In Atlanta, I thought my travel woes were over. I’d allocated two hours to get through customs and get on my connection with American. The exact flight path I was taking was LGW->ATL->DFW->AUS. As usual, the lines at immigration rivalled Disney theme ride lineups (and if you’ve ever watched or listened to frustrated but inexperienced travellers stressing out, you’d liken the people in line to the kids at Disney lines, too). What was different was the rate at which the line was moving: it wasn’t. An announcement informed everyone that the computers were down and all processing was being done manually, if at all.
We’ve all spent time in lines before. You line up for just about everything and everyone has their way of coping or optimizing. No matter what you do, though, it always seems like someone’s out to get you. If you switch lines at a grocery store, the first suddenly seems much faster. If you finally near the front of a long line, new checkout counters are made available much too late to be of use to you. Take those experiences and combine them into one and you’ve got my immigration experience. One particular person who was directing the human traffic seemed exceptionally adept at keeping me away from my flight. Not once, but twice, he would let a batch of people through and stop just when I was the next to go. Then, when we were all in our lines and new lines were made available, we would arbitrarily redirect a portion of our line to the new line … except he’d consistently start from everyone behind me.
By the time I got to the officer, I was resigned to missing my flight. The entire experience had taken the fully allotted two hours. When I first arrived, I noticed a large crowd behind me. At the immigration counter, I turned to look behind me and the line was practically empty. I wondered how it was that 50-100 people in line behind me had somehow cleared immigration before me.
The only saving grace to the entire ordeal was that American’s flight to Dallas and the subsequent flight to Austin were both delayed by an hour, so I was able to make my connection but not before struggling with Atlanta’s amazing two belt luggage system where you pick up your bag from the baggage claim, drop it off, take a train to baggage claim and wait for your bag AGAIN. I’ve always found the worst part of the journey was waiting for your bags because you’re always wondering if your bags arrived and you just want to get the bag so you can leave. In Atlanta, some genius decided they’d not only make that experience more painful, they’d just DOUBLE the experience. Laughs all around.
The final nail in the coffin I discovered when I opened my luggage at home in Austin. I had picked up the wrong bag …
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