Today was the first day of the truly ridiculous travel schedule. We were up at 5:15 and on our way not too long after that. United has tried to throw off our schedule a couple times so far, but they have yet to succeed.
Incident number one arose when the pilot announced that our arrival into San Francisco this morning would be into the international terminal. That’s great if you’re making an outbound international connection or terminating the trip in San Francisco, but for domestic connections it means a walk to the domestic terminal and going through security again. Not a big deal with a sufficiently padded schedule, but with a 33 minute connection things looked dicey. They didn’t get any better when the agent there decided that my wanting to watch my bag enter the x-ray machine deserved a thorough search of my bag. Still, we arrived in the gate area before they had started boarding so no troubles there.
Incident number two came as we were settling in on the plane. For some reason United decided that we both wanted to change our flights to a more direct routing. They actually came on to the plane to ask us why we were not still going to switch our flights. Suffice it to say that we stuck with the longer routing and are quite happy with that plan.
Flight number four was swapped out for a TED plane, which meant no first class seats. Not really a big deal, as I was pretty much ready to sleep anywhere. But we paid for first class on this trip and they didn’t deliver. Compensation will be coming soon. And it is the same flight tomorrow morning so we’ll have to deal with it again then.
The flying was all pretty good and it reminded me, once again, that earth really is best viewed from 35,000 feet.
We did get to see Oklahoma City a bit, thanks to a free rental car that should never have been. I saw the memorial for the bombing of the federal building. I can only hope that NYC manages something as classy and beautiful when they get around to building the one at the WTC site.
Food was a problem in Oklahoma City. We walked into a few places in the Bricktown district downtown and they all looked pretty bad. A bunch of places were closed, too, which doesn’t bode well for the area. Me eventually found somewhere to eat, but back out by the airport. We really tried, but it just wasn’t happening downtown.
A buffalo art thing in downtown Oklahoma City
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