August 29, 2006
Insane travel ::
travel — tagged california, flight, narrative, travel and washington dc
1:25 am
Earlier today I pictured myself in exactly the position I am in right now, awake at nearly 1 AM, typing away on my computer because my body thinks the time is three hours earlier. But the way I got here is totally different than what I had in mind. See, I just got in two hours ago from a trip out to San Francisco to visit Maureen for the weekend. The trip was a lot of fun—I was happy to catch up with Maureen, to meet new people, and to see a part of California I hadn’t seen before, including a pretty long trip down the coast that ultimately landed us in Santa Cruz before heading back North to the city—and getting back home today was a truly and adventure.
It all started when Maureen dropped me off at SFO on her way out of town to LA. I was two hours early for my flight—more than enough time to get checked in, get my baggage checked, and to hopefully spend most of the rest of the time waiting (impatiently) to board the flight. But when I went to check in using one of the computer terminals, I found that my flight had been delayed for so long that I was going to miss my connection. So, the computer rescheduled my itinerary, placing me on a flight that was scheduled to leave at 10 PM (yeah, that’s right. It was six hours later than my original departure time). But the program did put me on standby for another set of flights, the first of which was scheduled to leave SFO at 12:45, which gave me almost no time to get through security and get to the terminal before the plane left.
I made it in time, and I got in on standby. The new plane was a 767, a plane so enormous that looking out the windows somehow made the entire world seem small, even while parked at the terminal. I noted as we taxied toward takeoff that we left SFO late, which meant I had very little time to catch my connection at Dulles. Knowing the connection was likely to be the last one of the day, I tried not to stress out too much at the possibility of being put up in some anonymous, plastic-coated hotel room in suburban Washington, D.C., or worse, spend all night in the United terminal at Washington. So as the plan zig-zagged across the continent, I occcupied my mind by reading, by cataloging the trip, and by trying to find the Clif bar that I’d bought earlier, which had fallen under my seat.
One surreal aspect of flying is that sometimes you find yourself in a city you never expected to be in, that’s thousands of miles away from your planned destination. When you find yourself there, it’s like a vivid dream. Washington/Dulles was like that for me. Also, I wasn’t dressed for the weather. At 9 PM (for me, it was only 6), the temperature was hovering at 90 degrees—roughly 20 – 30 degrees warmer than anything I’d experienced while in San Francisco—and with my long pants and thermal undershirt, I definitely was over-dressed for it. I got off the plane to check the terminal I needed to get to to catch my connection to Burlington, which turned out to be halfway down the next terminal. And the entry was blinking an alert that the flight was boarding. I had to run.
I ran harder than I thought I could. I ran past crew members hustling toward their own flights. I cut between befuddled families who you could swear it was their first time in an airport. At one point, I seem to remember hurdling a roller bag someone had in tow, but it may be my tendency to aggrandize the facts for the sake of a good story. But no matter what, note that nowhere between the C and D terminals in Washington/Dulles are there any fast-tracks, so you must rely on your own athleticism and endurance.
I got to my terminal to find it empty. Desolate. There was one woman at the boarding gate, demanding my name, I told her I was on standby, and then told her my name after she asked for it again. “I called your name, you weren’t here,” she told me. “Late connection,” I replied, feeling oddly like I had something to apologize for. She wrote my seat assignment down on my standby ticket and let me out on the tarmac, where I caught a flight up to Burlington. At the end of it all, I got here an hour earlier than I was originally scheduled to, but my bags didn’t make it with me. I assume, for the sake of my own sanity, that they will arrive tomorrow, on the flight I should have been on had all of this fallen apart at some point. Come to think of it, as I write this, I realize that my bags have just taken off from SFO and are on their way to meet me.
So, earlier today, I thought I’d be in the situation I was in now. But I figured I’d have my checked baggage with me. And that I would have flown through O’Hare, where I would have had a two-hour layover, during which I could have grabbed dinner. So things turned out a little different than I expected—at the end of the day, though, the adventure, and the opportunity to tell the story, made it worthwhile.
