Come Fly With Me...If You Dare

This past month, as many of you know, I was home for the holidays, and spent a blissful month in my beautiful home state of California.  I enjoyed my time in the sun, hanging out with my family and friends, but getting there, and getting back, was a bit of a saga...

So, to begin with, I am cheap.  (No rude comments, if you please, POOKIE.)  I wanted to get the best deal, and flying home in December and coming back in January...some of the prices were ridiculous, and I didn't have a whole lot of money to spend.  To fly home to CA, I picked a nice, cheap flight with only one layover, in Denver.  My nice, cheap flight left at 6:30 in the morning...the day after the Messiah performance.  Which meant that I had to be at the airport by 4:30 in the morning.  Which meant we needed to leave by about 4 in the morning (it's not far, but I worry about being late ALL the time), which meant I needed to get up at about 3:30 in the morning, which meant that I really just took a nap after I finished packing, after getting home from Messiah at about, oh, 11-ish.  I'm an awesome trip planner!

My aunt, who conducted the Messiah choir, should be sainted for getting up at such an ungodly hour to drive me to the airport.

Checking in to fly home was only a bit of a hassle, mainly because I was in the wrong line (I am not a premier member of United's We're So Posh We're In An Airline Club club, so I couldn't use their line.  Even though no one else was in it.)  I was also molested by a TSA worker after I bleeped going through security.  They need to turn the sensitivity down on their machines, because you know what caused me to bleep?  The rivets on my jeans, and the underwires and clasp on my bra.  I was offered a full body pat down or a scan in the machine.  I chose the machine, because I already felt violated by the apparently-not-a-full-pat-down-but-still-darn-thorough check I'd already gone through.  Once they deemed me not a terrorist (although the Bra Bomber does have a nice ring to it...), I was allowed through, to sit and wait for my flight.

The travel gods then took pity on me, because for both of my flights, I was the only one in my row.  On my first flight, I was sitting in the last row before the bathrooms, and the flight attendant moved me up to another empty row so I could lean my seat back.  Then, landing at Palm Springs Airport, my bags were first through, so I grabbed them and sped out to a wonderful month of hanging out with family and friends in the ridiculously warm CA sunshine.

At some point in time during my holidays, I must have angered the travel gods.  I'm not sure what I did (enjoy the sun too much?), but if any of them are reading this, whatever it was I'M SORRY ALREADY!

First, I misread my takeoff time, so I got to the airport to go back to Edmonton an hour earlier than needed.  Second, since I am such an AWESOME trip planner, I picked a flight that had FOUR connections (it was the cheapest!).  That's right, I went from Palm Springs, to San Francisco, to Seattle, to Vancouver, to Edmonton.  Also, my final flight got in at 1 a.m.  Yeah, I could be a travel agent with these mad skillz.

Flying to San Francisco, I was again at the very back of the plane, but it was completely full, so I didn't get to move up.  And it was a smaller jet, with tiny seats; I have a bodacious booty, and was sitting next to Count Olaf's Brobdingnagian Person of Indeterminate Gender.  Super fun times!  At the San Francisco Airport, which is rumoured to have good food available, I picked a deli that defies that description, and gave me a ham sandwich that was dry and almost tasteless, and a Diet Coke that felt cold when I picked it up, but was decidedly not cold when I opened it up to drink it.  At least the chips were good.

I wanted to cry when my seatmates sat down on the plane, because the seats were even smaller, and while my seatmates were not Brobdingnagians, the guy in the middle was no pixie, and the guy on the aisle was fairly good sized too.  I couldn't put my arms back.  Thankfully, the aisle seated guy switched seats with middle guy's wife, who was tiny, and SHE sat in the middle.  For a while I was really worried.  The flight itself wasn't too bad, which was nice, because the flight from Seattle to Vancouver was horrible, thanks to the inclement weather. 

My flight was supposed to leave at 8:30.  It left Vancouver to fly TO Seattle at 8:00.  It's a short flight, but we didn't board and leave until about 8:55-ish.  Then, it was a teeny-weeny little prop plane, and the turbulence was horrible.  It was the kind of bouncing where you think, "Hey, this is kind of fun!" until you remember that you're FLYING a couple of miles up, and then you think, "HOLY CRAP!  I'm gonna DIE!"  I didn't die, obviously, but it was touch a go for a while there, I swear.

At the Vancouver airport, I had to go through Customs, which meant I had to explain to the (Hot) border agent my whole saga of why I'm going to school in Canada with no study permit.  He found it odd that I hadn't been given one, but I had my citizenship card, so he let me in.

Side note:  I have come to the conclusion that, while being extremely physically attractive may not actually be a job requirement for Canadian Border Services, it must certainly be a factor in hiring, at least for the booth agents.  Of the six on duty in Vancouver, four would qualify as hot in, I think, most people's estimations.  Add this to the hot border agent when I drove up, the hot border agent when I flew up ten years ago for Christmas, and reports from other people, I think it's safe to say that Canada likes their border agents to look GEWD.

After going through customs, I had thirty minutes to hoof it through to the other side of the airport, go BACK through security, and board my domestic flight to Edmonton.  I ended up having to run half the way, and did I mention I had a backpack AND a huge purse?  And in my backpack I was carrying a PS2 (the big console) and my laptop.  And had my iPad in my purse?  Not easy to run, and I barely made it - but I did make it.  I got seat jacked by a guy who wanted to sit by his wife and daughter, but that was fine with me, because it meant I got an aisle seat.  This plane was by far the nicest, with the widest seats and plenty of legroom.  We even had our own TVs to watch, but, lest I start thinking the travel gods were feeling kindly toward me again, there was NOTHING I wanted to watch available.  I'm just not into Russell Brand, Neil Patrick Harris, or shows like The Good Wife, True Blood, or The Killing.  So I played RE 4 on my iPod (actually, I played a lot of that while travelling).

Arriving in Edmonton was uneventful; I de-planed, went potty, and headed to pick up my bags.  I got to the baggage claim just as the first pieces of luggage were arriving.  I stood and waited until the last pieces of luggage were claimed.  Alas, my luggage was not among them.  So, at two in the morning, I stood in line and waited to report my luggage missing.  At two thirty, I actually got to do so (it went astray in San Francisco).  By two forty-five, I was ready to collapse, and could have cried tears of relief that I managed to snag the last taxi on duty outside the baggage claim to take me home.  My driver was a very nice man, who got me home in good time, and by three fifteen, I was home and ready for bed. 

As of this writing, my luggage has made it to Edmonton, and is supposedly en route through a delivery service.  Since I discovered today that the airline entered my address wrong, I'm a bit worried that I won't see it until tomorrow, but it is a 24 hour service, so maybe I'll get lucky.