Crazy planes! ⇒
Yesterday I got back from a short, 2 day business trip to Sacremento. It was a mostly unremarkable trip, except for the airline issues. On the way down Jim & I had a decent (45 minute) connection in san Francisco. Unfortunately, our flight left about 45 minutes late from Vancouver due to fog in San Fran. We landed at SFO with a few minutes to spare and long way to go! Turns out that we landed in Terminal 1 and had to get to Terminal 3 which was a looooon walk/run! We ran to our gate only to find out that we had just missed our flight! Darn. Just as we are turning back to go reschedule, someone says, "Sacramento? You can just make it"! Yes.
On the way back we arrived at the airport way in advance of our flight only to find that our flight was delayed due to fog. The United guy attempts to re-route us through LA, which we can just make if we leave right now. So we (again) race to our gate and check our tickets with the check-in desk. Turns out that the front desk guy didn't really create our tickets correctly. The lady at the desk was having a heck of a time re-issuing our tickets as they were international. We know to make the good connection in LA we HAVE TO get on the 12:25 flight from Sacramento. She says, "If you get on this flight I make no guarentees about your ticket. If you wait until the 1:30pm flight, I will straighten it out for sure." We decided to risk it. On the plane we went. When we landed, we rushed to the United desk to find out if she was able to fix our tickets while we were in the air. And she did!! We now just had to go to the Air Canada check in 5 terminal over. Oh no! Onto the shuttle bus and to the Air Canada desk we went. Got our tickets and ran to the gate. Of course, we had to wait in line to go through security again. Got to the gate with no time to spare...and good ol' Scare Canada, the flight is delayed! Whew. Time to get a drink and some food as we hadn't eaten since breakfast and it was now 3pm.
After all that rushing and changing we actually end up landing earlier than we were scheduled!
On a semi-related note, I got to try out CanPASS. This is an iris recognition system that allows you to bypass the immigration line when you arrive back in Canada from a foreign country. It works really well...from plane door to cab door was 8 minutes!
Some advice...if you are going on a short trip, get some carry-on luggage. If we had had checked luggage, we would have never been able to do any of that!