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Nov. 24th, 2001 12:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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theducks's request - the story of my trip to the DC meet.
5 days before the meet, I had no clue I'd be going. They were talking about it on channel, and I said that I wished I could go. So someone offered me their frequent flier miles.
This was all great, except that there really wasn't any way to get them to me in the 5 days before I had to leave. He was in San Francisco on business at the time, and said he'd fedex them to me.
On the day they were supposed to arrive, they didn't. I checked with the dorm mail room several times, and finally ended up calling fedex. They didn't have any record of it.
So I got in touch with the guy. He hadn't sent the tickets because there wasn't enough time. He was going to see if he could leave them at the airport. He couldn't.
He ended up leaving them with the parents of one of the girls in my dorm, who lived in San Jose (they also agreed to pick me up at the train station and take me to the airport).
That same night (the night before I had to leave), I tried to get train tickets from Davis to San Jose. The earliest train of the day (which would get me to San Jose about two and a half hours before my flight) was reservation only, and full. So I got the next one, which would get me there about an hour and a half before the flight, which should have been plenty of time.
Except the train broke down.
I got into San Jose an hour or so before my plane was supposed to leave, and fortunatly didn't have any trouble meeting up with my dorm-mate's parents.
We got to the airport ok, but once inside, they got lost in the car-rental return area for about 10 minutes.
I finally got to the check-in area. I asked the security people at the door if I needed to check-in to redeem the coupon I had, or if I could go straight to the gate. They told me to go straight to the gate. I went through security, and got pulled over for an extra search (as usual). At the gate, they told me that I needed to go to the check-in area to redeem the coupon.
So I headed back to the check-in area. They took forever and a day to figure out what was going on (because I wasn't the person with the account, though my name was on the ticket, iirc).
Ran back, and got to the gate just as they were closing up. That was my first experience with being the last person onto the plane :)
From there, the flight to DC was uneventful. I got in at about 11 and collapsed into the guy's wonderful guest bed and had the best sleep I'd had in half a year. (I suspect I'll be raving about this bed till the day I die, and nothing happened in it besides sleep :P It was sooooooo comfortable, especially after spending six months sleeping on a tiny little dorm bed with someone else in the room).
(I should probably mention at this point that I hadn't gotten more than 4 hours of sleep in the 48 hours before the trip. I had an essay due, and then a semi-friend online began telling me that people were making physical threats against the people going to the meet, which ended in me calling the FBI, but that's another story...)
Fast forward to Monday morning, at about 1:30 AM. My flight leaves at 11AM or so. I look at my ticket, and discover that it's for Sept. 18th (the meet was Memorial Day weekend, in May).
(This isn't as weird as it sounds. We'd done some weird stuff with the ticketing in order to get me on a flight. There were no flights available to anywhere near the Bay Area on Sunday or Monday, and I was required to fly into a BA airport for the round trip. However, the various legs of the same trip didn't have to be at the same time, so I'd arranged to fly into Phoenix on Monday, and then got a ticket on Southwest back to Sacramento. The last leg of the trip I scheduled out in the future (Sept. 18th) so that I'd have time to make changes if I somehow figured out a way to use it in the future. Apparently, this was too complicated for them, and they ended up scheduling it all on the 18th :)
So, I called the airline, and they managed to figure out how to get me to Phoenix. It actually worked out well - I got in early enough that I was able to make standby for an earlier flight to Sacramento, but it caused a few heart attacks.
If it weren't for this experience, and my experience in Philadelphia (where once again I was the last person allowed on a plane, due to an influx of passengers from a flight that had been cancelled the night before), I don't know if I'd have gotten on the plane yesterday - I'd have been convinced it was a sign that I wasn't supposed to go. But with all these flights that I should have missed but didn't, it's now just part of the routine...
theducks's request - the story of my trip to the DC meet.5 days before the meet, I had no clue I'd be going. They were talking about it on channel, and I said that I wished I could go. So someone offered me their frequent flier miles.
This was all great, except that there really wasn't any way to get them to me in the 5 days before I had to leave. He was in San Francisco on business at the time, and said he'd fedex them to me.
On the day they were supposed to arrive, they didn't. I checked with the dorm mail room several times, and finally ended up calling fedex. They didn't have any record of it.
So I got in touch with the guy. He hadn't sent the tickets because there wasn't enough time. He was going to see if he could leave them at the airport. He couldn't.
He ended up leaving them with the parents of one of the girls in my dorm, who lived in San Jose (they also agreed to pick me up at the train station and take me to the airport).
That same night (the night before I had to leave), I tried to get train tickets from Davis to San Jose. The earliest train of the day (which would get me to San Jose about two and a half hours before my flight) was reservation only, and full. So I got the next one, which would get me there about an hour and a half before the flight, which should have been plenty of time.
Except the train broke down.
I got into San Jose an hour or so before my plane was supposed to leave, and fortunatly didn't have any trouble meeting up with my dorm-mate's parents.
We got to the airport ok, but once inside, they got lost in the car-rental return area for about 10 minutes.
I finally got to the check-in area. I asked the security people at the door if I needed to check-in to redeem the coupon I had, or if I could go straight to the gate. They told me to go straight to the gate. I went through security, and got pulled over for an extra search (as usual). At the gate, they told me that I needed to go to the check-in area to redeem the coupon.
So I headed back to the check-in area. They took forever and a day to figure out what was going on (because I wasn't the person with the account, though my name was on the ticket, iirc).
Ran back, and got to the gate just as they were closing up. That was my first experience with being the last person onto the plane :)
From there, the flight to DC was uneventful. I got in at about 11 and collapsed into the guy's wonderful guest bed and had the best sleep I'd had in half a year. (I suspect I'll be raving about this bed till the day I die, and nothing happened in it besides sleep :P It was sooooooo comfortable, especially after spending six months sleeping on a tiny little dorm bed with someone else in the room).
(I should probably mention at this point that I hadn't gotten more than 4 hours of sleep in the 48 hours before the trip. I had an essay due, and then a semi-friend online began telling me that people were making physical threats against the people going to the meet, which ended in me calling the FBI, but that's another story...)
Fast forward to Monday morning, at about 1:30 AM. My flight leaves at 11AM or so. I look at my ticket, and discover that it's for Sept. 18th (the meet was Memorial Day weekend, in May).
(This isn't as weird as it sounds. We'd done some weird stuff with the ticketing in order to get me on a flight. There were no flights available to anywhere near the Bay Area on Sunday or Monday, and I was required to fly into a BA airport for the round trip. However, the various legs of the same trip didn't have to be at the same time, so I'd arranged to fly into Phoenix on Monday, and then got a ticket on Southwest back to Sacramento. The last leg of the trip I scheduled out in the future (Sept. 18th) so that I'd have time to make changes if I somehow figured out a way to use it in the future. Apparently, this was too complicated for them, and they ended up scheduling it all on the 18th :)
So, I called the airline, and they managed to figure out how to get me to Phoenix. It actually worked out well - I got in early enough that I was able to make standby for an earlier flight to Sacramento, but it caused a few heart attacks.
If it weren't for this experience, and my experience in Philadelphia (where once again I was the last person allowed on a plane, due to an influx of passengers from a flight that had been cancelled the night before), I don't know if I'd have gotten on the plane yesterday - I'd have been convinced it was a sign that I wasn't supposed to go. But with all these flights that I should have missed but didn't, it's now just part of the routine...
