An Ode to the Airlines

To all of you who work in the airline industry, run airports, or have anything to do with the TSA - kindly go jump in the lake.

(That's actually nicer than I had planned to say it last night.)

There, I feel better. Having said all that, let me explain yesterday's odyssey as we tried to get home from Northern California. I had planned to take a 1:30 pm flight from Oakland. That would give us a fairly leisurely morning to get ready and leave from Rohnert Park, and would get us home by 3:30 pm so we could enjoy the rest of the afternoon and evening at home.

The gods laugh at you when you make plans like that.

We originally planned to leave the hotel at 11am, but due to the heightened security and expected long security lines, we pushed our time up and actually left a little before 10. We arrived at the rental car lot in about an hour, and by 11:45 had checked in for our flight and made it through security. We had plenty of time for lunch and were back at our gate by 1pm, just when they should have started announcing our flight. They made an announcement all right, but not what we were hoping for. Our airplane had a mechanical problem that was estimated to take 1-2 hours to fix. Oh joy.

After 2 hours they announced that the original problem had been fixed, but they found something else - a problem with a light and they were trying to get their maintenance folks to allow the flight to go and fix the problem in Orange County. They asked for another 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, another drama was unfolding. The cops showed up at our gate and started talking to the gate crew. They then called for a specific passenger, and that lady was interviewed by the police. After a couple of minutes she returned to her seat and I assumed it was all over. Not so. Three more cops showed up along with a police dog and some folks that looked like supervisors (either for the airline or the cops). The dog was taken onto the plane and the lady was called up again. This time she was taken across the terminal to an empty gate and spent a long time talking to various officers. I never heard the result of the investigation, but I'm assuming there must have been some type of threat made, not necessarily by the lady, but by someone connected to her. She was still talking to the cops when we left the gate.

Did you catch the "left the gate" part? At 3 hours they cancelled the flight. Given that this was July 1 and many people were traveling for the holiday, most flights were jammed full. We had to go back to the main front counter, past a security line that had grown to monumental proportions (the line had to be at least an hour long), and had to get in a "special" line so the airline could figure out what to do with us. They offered a few seats on JetBlue flights to Long Beach, but didn't have enough for everybody and at that point I had had it with airline travel. There was no way I was going to play roulette with another flight, and I definitely wasn't going to stand in that security line again.

I called a couple of rental car companies that consider me a VIP client, and Hertz agreed to rent me a car one way from Oakland to Orange County at an exorbitant price. I took it. I waited another 45 minutes in line to get them to refund my Alaska Airlines tickets, and then headed back to the off-airport rental car facility. We loaded everything into a Grand Marquis and finally pulled out of the Hertz lot at 5:25 pm. As we were getting ready I loaded our home address into the Hertz GPS system and discovered that we had a 412 miles drive ahead of us that was estimated to take 5 hours and 57 minutes.

The GPS guided us home, and out on I-5 I really aired out that big V-8. There were many stretches when the Grand Marquis was clicking off a mile every 45 seconds. You do the math.

We made only one brief stop in Lebec for gas and a bathroom, hit some ridiculous traffic between Castaic and the Magic Mountain area, and pulled up in front of Casa de HolyCoast at 11:30 pm. Six hours and five minutes from Oakland. Not bad.

It cost me more to drive than take my chances on another airline flight, but to me it was worth it. Air travel has become such a pain in the butt that I'm going to avoid it every chance I can. We plan to visit my daughter up north as much as possible, but unless I absolutely have to fly, I'm going to drive. You can have the airlines and the crowded airports.