It all began Tuesday afternoon on my JetBlue flight from Charlotte to JFK. About an hour out of Charlotte there was a medical emergency on board. Apparently a woman was having problems breathing. She was several rows behind me so I couldn’t see exactly what was going on. Because of this the flight turned back to Charlotte. We get halfway back to Charlotte and they decide the woman is doing ok so they turn the plane around to head back to JFK. We’re heading to JFK for another 15 minutes or so before we turn back around to Charlotte – apparently we had lost our landing spot. We’re now heading back to Charlotte again when after 15 minutes the plane heads back towards JFK – we got a new landing spot. Of course, none of this information was relayed to us until afterwards, so all I saw was the plane flying in circles on the seatback GPS map. Thank goodness I had a 3 hour layover in JFK or I would have missed my connecting flight.

We finally get to JFK. This was my first trip to JFK and I hope it will be my last. JFK now ranks as my second least favorite airport – bested only by Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow. JetBlue I think is in one of the original JFK terminals. You can tell the terminal’s age by the narrow board indentations used to hold the walls while the concrete dried. Unfortunately the Delta terminal is a couple stops away via the airport train. I get off at the Delta terminal and find out that you have to walk about 500m and cross two streets (well, actually the same street twice – which is an even worse design than crossing two different streets). I get up to the terminal and the line is out the door, down the street and around the corner. If it had been raining everyone would have been screwed. Luckily is was only sunny and hot so we were all stinky and sweaty instead. There was an old Italian woman behind me who decided she had had enough. She walked up to the door and tried to talk her way in … to no avail. If the crotchety old Italian grandma can’t get in fast – no one can.

The line worried me a bit – with my JetBlue delays I now only had about 90 minutes before my flight to Nice took off. After about 60 minutes of waiting outside I finally made it inside – only to see the line continue. Crappity. At this point my flight left in 30 minutes and I didn’t even have a boarding pass. Then I spotted them – the check-in kiosks. I didn’t think you could check in internationally with the kiosks, but a few questions to the Delta staff guarding the main door, confirmed that I could as long as I wasn’t checking any baggage. I wasn’t.

I managed to pack all belongings for this week long trip into a daypack. Even I was impressed with my packing ability. Although, when you’re going to a beach resort you don’t need many bulky clothes – shorts and polo shirts don’t take up much room.

Anyway, back to Delta check-in. I go up to the kiosk and try to check in. Well, as it turns out, you can’t check in at a kiosk if your flight leaves within 30 minutes. Super. I flag down one of the Delta staff and explain my problem – trying to be as calm as possible for a person whose flight was leaving within 30 minutes. She tried to check me in and got the same error. Luckily there was a special desk set up just for people who were having problems with the check-in kiosks (if you need a special desk to service people with kiosk check-in errors – and there were only 2 kiosks – it seems to me there is something wrong with you kiosk check-in system, but I wasn’t complaining). I managed to talk my way past the two people ahead of me at the kiosk service line (their flights didn’t leave until 5 minutes after mine). I got my boarding pass and breezed through security (probably since everyone was still waiting in the check-in line). I briskly walked down to my gate and was able to get on my flight with no problems. As it was the flight was delayed 15 minutes (not that there were any notification boards out in the street where everyone was standing waiting to check in – so had no way of knowing the stasis of the flights).

After everyone had boarded they made an announcement asking for volunteers to give up their seat for a $600 flight voucher plus hotel stay near the airport. I told the flight attendant I would take the offer if they could get me to Nice before 7pm the next day (when our retreat officially started), but either someone took the money before me or they couldn’t get me to Nice before 7pm the next day because I didn’t get the offer.

The flight to Nice was uneventful. As usual they showed a string of crappy movies that I didn’t watch. Stay tuned for the rest of the story ….

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I wasn’t too worried because the earliest that last flight out of Dulles to Greenville had ever left was 30 minutes late. That would still give me 30 minutes to take in the mass chaos of Terminal A. We finally touch down at Dulles and I turn on my Blackberry and go straight to United’s website to check the flight status. It had already left – 5 minutes EARLY! WTF! The one time I want them to leave late they leave early. What flight ever leaves early? Why couldn’t they have left early the 6 previous times I took this flight?

Great. I walk down to the Terminal A customer service desk. As usual, there are about 50 people in line and 1 representative at the desk. F-that. I’ll go find another customer service desk to help me out. I leave the terminals and go to the main United check-in counter. It’s completely empty – not a United employee in sight. It’s about 10:10pm at this time. Apparently, the check-in counters close at 10pm. At a United hub airport I would have expected at least 1 representative there among the 50 meters of check-in counters. Nope. Damn. Maybe I should have waited in that line. Still, I wasn’t giving up.

My next mission was to try to get back into the terminal area and find an open customer service station. I did have a boarding pass, after all – never mind that the flight already left. I walk the 3 miles from the United check-in counter to the security check-in (as you may remember from my last blog, United somehow got the shaft in their own hub in proximity to security check-in). Well, they wouldn’t let me in. Hmmm, now I was getting a bit nervous. I go back to the check-in area and notice there are some customer service phones there. I call up and am able to get my flight rescheduled for the next day (unfortunately, not until the afternoon so I was going to miss a day of work). However, I couldn’t exactly get a hotel voucher over the phone and the representative on the other end wasn’t very helpful in getting me information of where to get that.

The only United representative I could find in the entire airport outside the terminals was in the lost baggage area. So, I waited in line there and requested my hotel voucher at that desk. Luckily, they were able to help me out. As a consolation for wasting time meandering all over the airport they had run out of United Express airport rooms (probably a Motel 6) and put me up in a full-on United hotel room (a Hilton).

When I got to the Hilton I was sure to show them my Hilton HHonors Silver card to get my upgrade to the VIP floor (which in this case was just a section since there were only 2 floors). I watched a bit of TV on my room’s 50” plasma screen TV before drifting off to sleep.

My flight back to Greenville the next day was (thankfully) uneventful. My already low regard for Dulles Terminal A was lowered even more that weekend.

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The Terminal A/Dulles experience can be traced all the way back to when you first walk in the airport doors. All of United’s check-in counters are on the far right side. However, the security checks are on the middle-left side of the cavernous check-in area. United essentially owns Dulles – why can’t they put their tickets counters right in front of the security check rather than require passengers to make a marathon trek from check-in to the security check?

The next part of the Dulles experience is the large people movers used to shuttle people from one terminal to another. You hop on this big elevated box on wheels that drives across a working tarmac while dodging 737s be taxiing around the gate area. Dulles is installing some kind of subway to move you between terminals, but I’m sure it won’t be functional for 10 years, and then will break down immediately.

You get off the people mover and take the escalator down into Terminal A. It’s like descending into a dungeon – a dungeon crammed full of angry people. Terminal A is calm about 5 minutes a day. The rest of the time it is the busiest, most chaotic airport experience you can imagine. Usually there are several people crying and at least one or two men muttering under their breath how they’d rather have a hot iron poked in their eye than fly through here again.

The requirement for check-in personnel in Terminal A is that they must speak English with the thickest foreign accent possible. If the hiring manager can understand more than one word out of three then they are forced to work in international departures (where it’s likely people will actually understand them much better). I have no problem with accents, but when you are in a customer service job in an American airport, you need to be understood. If you aren’t, the rednecks start getting irate. The last thing you want in an airport is a redneck fight.

In Terminal A each gate serves about 5 planes at one time – all of which leave within 10 minutes of each other. They call out gate flight information, but of course you can’t understand the gate personnel. Even if you could, you probably wouldn’t be able to hear them through the background noise of a thousand irritated customers and 5 planes sitting right outside the “always open for no reason I can explain other than to make it very hard to hear flight announcements” door. Usually I wish I had earplugs when I’m in Terminal A.

You never know when they are going to board your flight. The boarding time listed on your ticket is irrelevant. The only thing you can do is stand right in front of the gate and strain your ears really hard to understand what the hell is going on. Of course there are 5 planes worth of people right there with you all trying to listen to the same information. The last time I was there I experienced a new phenomenon (there is always at least one new phenomenon with every Terminal A trip). They boarded my plane by calling out individual customers by name – one at a time. I learned it takes a long time to board a plane when you do it one person at a time – even a small plane. Why did they do this? No idea. It was getting late and they probably realized they hadn’t met their stupid quota yet that day.

If you miss your flight because you didn’t hear your name called through the jet engine screaming 20 feet outside the open door, there is a customer service desk to help you with your missed flight. I have never seen less than 20 people in this line and often in snakes down the corridor. I have never had to stand in this line, but I have eaten at the pizza place across the hall and watched people wait in this line. It doesn’t look fun.

The fun doesn’t end there. After you pass through the ticket check you walk down this semi-enclosed walkway to your regional jet. Along this walkway there are multiple doors for the other 4 planes leaving from this same gate at nearly the same time. Above the doors are signs listing the destination of each plane. Sometimes the signs work, but not always. Sometimes there is a person there to yell at you for wandering up to 3 different planes before finding yours, but not always. I always thought it was silly that the flight attendant would start every flight by listing the destination of the aircraft and that asking anyone not going to that destination to leave the aircraft – that was until I discovered Terminal A. Twice at Dulles I have seen someone leave the aircraft for that reason.

Once the plane is ready to go, you are at the mercy of the ground crew to push you away from the terminal. The Terminal A ground crew aren’t exactly fleet footed. Usually there is a 15-20 minute delay while the ground crew gets their sh*t together enough to hold the little flashlights in the air.

Eventually you are off and very happy to arrive back in your easy-breezy Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport – where even the economy parking is only 100 yards from the terminal.

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I had about a 2 hour layover in Heathrow’s Terminal 3. I don’t recall what the other terminals are like, but terminal 3 is essentially a high end shopping mall. It is also the only airport I’ve been to where people are actually shopping at these overpriced airport stores.

When I arrived at the terminal I checked the board and saw that my flight to Boston hadn’t been assigned a gate yet so I bought a bagel and sat down to play my Nintendo DS. I got up every ten minutes or so to check the board and each time the plane hadn’t been assigned a gate yet. After about 40 minutes I see a stream of people running down the hallway to the gates. That’s weird. I went back to my Nintendo, but those people made me nervous so I checked the board again. My flight was now labeled as “last call”. What the heck – just 15 minutes ago it didn’t even have a gate and now it’s last call!? I guess I won’t be taking a bathroom break after all. I ran down to the gate where they check your boarding pass and herd you into a small waiting room where everyone sat for about 30 minutes before boarding the plane. Last call my arse.

The plane was a 777. It wasn’t full so I didn’t have anyone sitting next to me – a rarity for my travels during the last year. I was happy to see TV’s on the back of each seat. Unfortunately they didn’t have on-demand programming. You had to watch whatever was playing on the 10 channels without the ability to stop the movie or start another one. Interestingly, I was on a USAir flight from Rome to Philadelphia 7 years ago that had this capability, yet I have not seen it since. What’s up with that? I thought technology was supposed to get more advanced as time went on.

I settled into my seat and watched The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and Talladega Nights – both of which I had already seen in Sofia, the latter only 2 days previous. It was still funny.

We got into Logan about 20 minutes early so I was feeling pretty good about the flight experience. That all changed when I was the only one at the baggage carrousel still waiting for my luggage. Yes, American had managed to lose my luggage. I filled out the lost luggage report and walked outside where my sister picked me up. I will say it was a lot easier not having to carry those two huge duffel bags.

About 2 minutes after we left the airport it started to rain and didn’t stop for about 36 hours. Super.

We stopped by my sister’s house to meet her new dog Budda. Budda was afraid of me, but I still tried to smother him with my love.

I was still on Sofia time so I woke up about 4:30am unable to sleep and started organizing a bunch of crap in my old room. It’s amazing how much you can get done in a day when you start at 4:30am. Wednesday morning I went out and got my Mustang GT re-registered. Oh, it was nice to be able to drive it again. Too bad I actually have to follow traffic laws in America.

The next step was to get a mobile phone set up. I already had the phone – a Blackberry I used with T-Mobile before going to Bulgaria – so I just needed to get a new T-Mobile SIM card to be up and running again. T-Mobile has some deal where if you sign up you get a free phone so now I have a crappy Nokia as a backup to my Blackberry.

Wednesday afternoon I got a call from the airport saying my bags were located and would be leaving Logan at 4pm. I could expect them in 4-6 hours. That’s either a really slow truck or it was going to be making many stops before mine. Well, at least they found my luggage.

The day ended with a big dinner of Mexican food and watching the Daily Show and Colbert report.

I wake up this morning (Thursday) and still no luggage. Very nice. 4-6 hours was now running just over 14 hours. I called American and they said the baggage was on the truck and would be delivered around 9:30am. Great. It was now 8am so I hop in the shower. As soon as I put shampoo in my hair the doorbell rings. My bags had arrived. I answered the door in a towel, still soaking wet and covered in soap and shampoo. Thank you very much. Well, at least now I wouldn’t have to wear the same underwear for a third day.

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Since our plane was delayed 3 hours in Budapest we decided to have some fun.

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