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Aug. 1st, 2022 10:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnAfter not going on a plane for two and a half years, I have now been on three plane trips in the space of less than a month.
Trip #1: my family reunion in Juneau, Alaska. My parents and sister did not come, but I got to hang out with some of my cousins, which was really super. We did not have powerpoint presentations, having had a zoom ppt meeting last Christmas. We did have a lot of very yummy fish cookouts, due to all my cousins in attendance (except us -- we thought the kids were too young to get into it) going salmon-and-halibut fishing and coming back with a huge amount of extremely fresh fish. (Our (immediate) family's consensus was that the halibut was okay, but that we really liked the fresh king salmon.)
E seemed to be having a reasonable time at the time, and she noted she liked the food :) but afterwards decided she didn't like the trip that much. This seems to be almost wholly due to our choice to book a kayaking trip on Lake Mendenhall (next to the Mendenhall glacier, which I thought was awesome) which then got canceled due to wind, so we went sea kayaking instead. She's been kayaking a bunch of times but on this particular go-round decided that she hated it and was very unhappy with it. It may have been because of the longer range (the kayak people recommended a 4-mile round-trip kayak path, of which we probably managed about 3 miles; previous kayak trips haven't been that long, and I found afterwards that the skin between my finger and thumb had worn away and if it had been any longer I'd have had pretty bad blisters). IDK.
Anyway, her bad feelings about kayaking seem to have spread to cover the entire trip. But it's also true that the kids were really looking forward to gold panning, which turned out to be harder than E had anticipated, and also we didn't get in as many hikes as we had anticipated, in between the trips we'd booked that kept getting canceled (the gold panning also had to be rescheduled) and the kids always getting a late start in the morning. (This was partially because of breakfasting with cousins, which was great, but also at least partially due to my poor decision to let them have access to screens during this trip; I did not make this same mistake for Trip #3.) So yeah, overall it wasn't the greatest trip in terms of sightseeing. Juneau is also a very weird place due to being a very cruise-ship-heavy destination (the only other ways to get there are via ferry or plane). Which sometimes was good (not too much problem parking at Mendenhall Glacier!) but often meant a lot of random tourist kitsch and/or large crowds that would disgorge themselves at what are probably predictable times for residents but weren't predictable for us.
So... yeah, if we had to do it again (which may happen; my extended family was very pleased by the fishing) we'd take longer (we only went for the reunion itself, which was Thurs-Tues) and maybe go to more places in Alaska.
Trip #2: work trip, during which I was able to detour for a couple of days and see my family of origin (parents, sister, sister's family) which was great -- parents have been here to visit but I have not been out there since the pandemic started, and in particular have not seen sister and family for 2 1/2 years. Her kids are much more extroverted than my kids and rather more starved for visitors, I think, because as soon as I walked in the door my 4-year-old nephew (JA) ran up to me and declaimed, "I love you!" and within half an hour he, my 7-year-old niece (O.), and my sister were all clamoring to show me their little treasures. I felt very loved! :)
O. and I also bonded over yarn crafting -- I tried teaching her chain stitch and I think she mostly got it, though doing it with her fingers rather than with a hook (that's how I did it at her age too, so). We would sit around after JA went to bed and I'd work on A's blanket (this is the one with 100 squares, of which I had done something like 76 as of that trip) and she would work on making a necklace with chain stitch and sometimes we'd talk about random stuff. It was really nice! I also read books to O. and JA, who were very excited about this! Their parents were happy to get a break from it, and I was happy to be with kids who actually enjoyed having me read to them :) (E never liked me reading to her, and A. liked it until he learned how to read himself -- he'll still ask for it every once in a while, but generally speaking he prefers to read himself and tell me about funny things he reads.)
I think I've mentioned before that my sister collects fandom pins? (Enamel and metal pins.) Where her fandoms are mostly Harry Potter and Disney-related. Being on, well, this text-heavy side of fandom, I had no idea that fandom pins were even a thing before she got into them. I'm also used to, y'know, being able to buy these kinds of pins for like $10 on etsy, but these are Super Special Limited Editions that you get on drops on IG sometimes for what can be five times or ten times that amount, or sometimes more. (Me: "What??" My brain: "Cahn, it's like how natural gemstones command much higher prices than synthetic ones even when they look exactly the same." Me: "Oh, okay, got it! Thanks brain." Me: "Except it seems like the resale market is somewhat broader for gemstones..." ) Anyway... she has a lot of pins.
I also had a bit of time to work on my dad's memoirs (I had promised my dad I'd work on them during the trip), and although they are not quite done I think I can see the light at the end!
Trip #3: D's family reunion, at the YMCA of the Rockies. The actual reunion was Fri-Sun, but we went on Tuesday, rented a house with D's dad, and spent a couple of days in Rocky Mountain National Park, doing various short hikes (I think the longest we did was 3-4 miles, and they were all pretty flat -- D's dad is 82 and although he has a lot of endurance, he is pretty slow and can't really do slopes very well) and driving down Trail Ridge Road. D's dad reminisced about how their family had climbed Longs Peak when their youngest child was 10, and E now feels that she has to get in shape to do this :)
E really enjoyed RMNP. I honestly think that part of this was that we did get out relatively early in the morning (8am) because the permit we had was an 8am permit, and because we didn't allow screen time except when E was working on her math homework (which both kids complained bitterly about at the time, of course, but I really do think it helped a lot). But also for some reason she really, really liked the tundra! We did the Tundra Trail (half a mile to rock outcroppings) and saw marmots and she and D saw a pika, and she just thought it all was amazing, and loved that we were above the treeline, and loved the little signs to read on the trail that gave her facts about the tundra. I don't find tundra that compelling, myself, but I'm happy she did!
D's family reunion had previously been at the YMCA of the Rockies, something like 18 years ago, but I remembered exactly nothing about it. It's a really cool place! The rooms are much nicer than I had expected -- more like a motel than a hostel, which is sort of what I had been expecting. And lots of fun activities! A. did minigolf twice (he is now a minigolf fiend), and we went swimming, and the kids did archery (for an extra $10) which they loved, and there is this amazing crafts place that is honestly the nicest craft place I've ever been at (maybe I need to go to more?) -- you could do tie-dye, pottery painting, leather stamping and staining (E made a coaster with bears), glass mosaicing with grout (A made a cube picture-holder), jewelry beading, and then for older kids/adults there is glass fusion and silk painting. (It looks wildly time-consuming, but I'd love to go back and try silk painting sometime...)
D's family reunion is a large affair; his dad's mother was one of thirteen children, and the descendants of all of those are who come to the reunion. (There are 776 living descendants, of which maybe 100 came.) It was fun, although I had a moment of melancholy when I realized that the reason that I didn't recognize anyone was because a lot of the people (from D's dad's family) I'd met and spent time with at previous reunions (the last one we went to was almost ten years ago) had died. On the other hand, there were a lot more brunettes than I remember from the last time we went, and one more POC (another Asian)! It's something else, though -- there was a group singalong with (among other songs) "Edelweiss" and "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," and I'd forgotten the Elbows on the Table Tradition. That is, if anyone sees you with your elbows on the table (the kids are generally the policers of this), a whole chant starts up, with associated clapping:
Cahn, cahn, strong and able
Get your elbows off the table!
This is not a horse's stable
But a first-class dining table!
Round the table you must go, you must go, you must go
Round the table you must go; you were naughty!
(The last two lines are sung to the tune of "London Bridge," and during this time the offender must circle the table. If they don't get back to their seat by the end, another verse is sung.)
I was lucky enough that 2 1/2 of these trips went pretty well in terms of flights being mostly on time, etc. Then we come to our trip back from Denver. I imagine it is because it took D so long to buy the tickets, but anyway we we were scheduled on a Sunday night 7:30 (nonstop) flight back from Denver. Well... that Sunday there were thunderstorms. So our flight got pushed back, and then later (so did D's dad's flight, but fortunately they took off eventually), and then the pilot came out and said to the waiting passengers that they would have to cancel the flight (because of regulations on how long the crew could fly). Thanks United for making that clear! /s (United did officially cancel the flight shortly afterwards, but you'd think they would have known this was a problem before the pilot told us!) A very nice person directed us to a short UA line (the line we'd been waiting in was extremely long) and D managed to divert us to an airport that was "only" 2 1/2 hours away, so then we could rent a car to get home. (There were no flights left to get to our actual airport until Tuesday morning.)
So we did that, renting the car was reasonable, and then half an hour into the trip we started hearing this weird bonking noise (at what I'd estimate as, oh, 3-5 Hz or so) on the car's front right side, which got louder and faster as the car got faster. D exited a couple of times and stopped to look at the car, and didn't see anything overtly wrong -- he was looking for something like a rock or a stick. The third time, he looked more at the tires and saw that a long "string" of rubber had come loose from the tire (!) and was making the bonking sound as it flapped. He cut off the string, but as you might be able to infer, the tire was Not in good shape At All (D showed us where you could start seeing the metal of the wheel under it) and we then diverted again (fortunately we were 15 minutes away from another Avis) and got another car. Happily, as soon as D started saying to the Avis rep that we needed to exchange cars, the rep took one look at the car and said, "Yep, I see that the tires on this aren't looking good..."
Anyway, that was the last issue we had with travel and we got home without any further incident, but also some really good Peruvian-fusion food about an hour from our house, and I'm already trying to figure out how to go back to that place :)
I had 78 squares of A's blanket done before Trip #3; I did three more squares during the course of the trip, and then four more squares during our travel adventures coming home. And yes, that tells you something about how much tiiiime we spent trying to get home.
Then, literally two hours after we got home, my throat started feeling scratchy. The next day I felt OK (except for my throat) until lunchtime, at which point I slept for six hours straight. The day after that I slept until 1pm, and at that time finally tested positive on a covid test. At least I was masked while I was in the airport/airplane, I guess. D and the kids started having symptoms and testing positive about a day afterwards. We're all mostly better now, just some residual tiredness. (The kids are totally better except that they are actually sleeping as soon as they get to bed, which frankly is a plus for me.)
(The funny thing is that -- I expect this is the result of being vaxxed/boosted and the liberal application of ibuprofen? -- I could feel that my body is super in need of sleep/rest, but my brain wasn't fogged up nearly as badly as it it was in Mystery Illness of Feb 2020. The problem was more that I kept needing to lie down after being awake for a couple of hours. But the connection from my brain to my mouth does seem to be affected (and I couldn't talk for several days anyway because my throat was very sore).)
The surprising thing to me is that it took me until trip #3 to get covid! (I had at least one other close contact exposure I know about; Boss got covid after trip #2, and I was in meetings with him literally all day. I'd like to blame it on him/on that trip, but the timing just doesn't work.) But D's reunion was by far more risky than either of my other two trips (given that his family is so large and so geographically spread out, and also in general less worried about covid than my family is), so there's that, and also I suppose it's possible we got it from being in the airport for many many hours on end (but I'm pretty sure that wasn't it, that would have been too close). I will admit that I wasn't as careful as I could have been during the reunion, because I quite frankly didn't see how I could be going to church every week and have two school/camp-aged kids and gone on these other trips and not have gotten whatever the latest variant was already. But, well, apparently I hadn't yet.
The other funny/good thing: as of today, D's dad has not gotten covid yet, which means I think that he won't get sick from the reunion. I'm really happy about this, because he's 82. I'm also kind of shocked, because I think he probably spent a lot more time talking to people at the reunion than we did. But I suppose we were talking to different sets of people... (He also didn't stay in the same room as we did, which I was glad about before because it would have been hard to make that work, but now I'm even more glad because I don't think he could have avoided it if we'd all been in the same room!)
(Did four squares while having covid... now working on square 90.)
Trip #1: my family reunion in Juneau, Alaska. My parents and sister did not come, but I got to hang out with some of my cousins, which was really super. We did not have powerpoint presentations, having had a zoom ppt meeting last Christmas. We did have a lot of very yummy fish cookouts, due to all my cousins in attendance (except us -- we thought the kids were too young to get into it) going salmon-and-halibut fishing and coming back with a huge amount of extremely fresh fish. (Our (immediate) family's consensus was that the halibut was okay, but that we really liked the fresh king salmon.)
E seemed to be having a reasonable time at the time, and she noted she liked the food :) but afterwards decided she didn't like the trip that much. This seems to be almost wholly due to our choice to book a kayaking trip on Lake Mendenhall (next to the Mendenhall glacier, which I thought was awesome) which then got canceled due to wind, so we went sea kayaking instead. She's been kayaking a bunch of times but on this particular go-round decided that she hated it and was very unhappy with it. It may have been because of the longer range (the kayak people recommended a 4-mile round-trip kayak path, of which we probably managed about 3 miles; previous kayak trips haven't been that long, and I found afterwards that the skin between my finger and thumb had worn away and if it had been any longer I'd have had pretty bad blisters). IDK.
Anyway, her bad feelings about kayaking seem to have spread to cover the entire trip. But it's also true that the kids were really looking forward to gold panning, which turned out to be harder than E had anticipated, and also we didn't get in as many hikes as we had anticipated, in between the trips we'd booked that kept getting canceled (the gold panning also had to be rescheduled) and the kids always getting a late start in the morning. (This was partially because of breakfasting with cousins, which was great, but also at least partially due to my poor decision to let them have access to screens during this trip; I did not make this same mistake for Trip #3.) So yeah, overall it wasn't the greatest trip in terms of sightseeing. Juneau is also a very weird place due to being a very cruise-ship-heavy destination (the only other ways to get there are via ferry or plane). Which sometimes was good (not too much problem parking at Mendenhall Glacier!) but often meant a lot of random tourist kitsch and/or large crowds that would disgorge themselves at what are probably predictable times for residents but weren't predictable for us.
So... yeah, if we had to do it again (which may happen; my extended family was very pleased by the fishing) we'd take longer (we only went for the reunion itself, which was Thurs-Tues) and maybe go to more places in Alaska.
Trip #2: work trip, during which I was able to detour for a couple of days and see my family of origin (parents, sister, sister's family) which was great -- parents have been here to visit but I have not been out there since the pandemic started, and in particular have not seen sister and family for 2 1/2 years. Her kids are much more extroverted than my kids and rather more starved for visitors, I think, because as soon as I walked in the door my 4-year-old nephew (JA) ran up to me and declaimed, "I love you!" and within half an hour he, my 7-year-old niece (O.), and my sister were all clamoring to show me their little treasures. I felt very loved! :)
O. and I also bonded over yarn crafting -- I tried teaching her chain stitch and I think she mostly got it, though doing it with her fingers rather than with a hook (that's how I did it at her age too, so). We would sit around after JA went to bed and I'd work on A's blanket (this is the one with 100 squares, of which I had done something like 76 as of that trip) and she would work on making a necklace with chain stitch and sometimes we'd talk about random stuff. It was really nice! I also read books to O. and JA, who were very excited about this! Their parents were happy to get a break from it, and I was happy to be with kids who actually enjoyed having me read to them :) (E never liked me reading to her, and A. liked it until he learned how to read himself -- he'll still ask for it every once in a while, but generally speaking he prefers to read himself and tell me about funny things he reads.)
I think I've mentioned before that my sister collects fandom pins? (Enamel and metal pins.) Where her fandoms are mostly Harry Potter and Disney-related. Being on, well, this text-heavy side of fandom, I had no idea that fandom pins were even a thing before she got into them. I'm also used to, y'know, being able to buy these kinds of pins for like $10 on etsy, but these are Super Special Limited Editions that you get on drops on IG sometimes for what can be five times or ten times that amount, or sometimes more. (Me: "What??" My brain: "Cahn, it's like how natural gemstones command much higher prices than synthetic ones even when they look exactly the same." Me: "Oh, okay, got it! Thanks brain." Me: "Except it seems like the resale market is somewhat broader for gemstones..." ) Anyway... she has a lot of pins.
I also had a bit of time to work on my dad's memoirs (I had promised my dad I'd work on them during the trip), and although they are not quite done I think I can see the light at the end!
Trip #3: D's family reunion, at the YMCA of the Rockies. The actual reunion was Fri-Sun, but we went on Tuesday, rented a house with D's dad, and spent a couple of days in Rocky Mountain National Park, doing various short hikes (I think the longest we did was 3-4 miles, and they were all pretty flat -- D's dad is 82 and although he has a lot of endurance, he is pretty slow and can't really do slopes very well) and driving down Trail Ridge Road. D's dad reminisced about how their family had climbed Longs Peak when their youngest child was 10, and E now feels that she has to get in shape to do this :)
E really enjoyed RMNP. I honestly think that part of this was that we did get out relatively early in the morning (8am) because the permit we had was an 8am permit, and because we didn't allow screen time except when E was working on her math homework (which both kids complained bitterly about at the time, of course, but I really do think it helped a lot). But also for some reason she really, really liked the tundra! We did the Tundra Trail (half a mile to rock outcroppings) and saw marmots and she and D saw a pika, and she just thought it all was amazing, and loved that we were above the treeline, and loved the little signs to read on the trail that gave her facts about the tundra. I don't find tundra that compelling, myself, but I'm happy she did!
D's family reunion had previously been at the YMCA of the Rockies, something like 18 years ago, but I remembered exactly nothing about it. It's a really cool place! The rooms are much nicer than I had expected -- more like a motel than a hostel, which is sort of what I had been expecting. And lots of fun activities! A. did minigolf twice (he is now a minigolf fiend), and we went swimming, and the kids did archery (for an extra $10) which they loved, and there is this amazing crafts place that is honestly the nicest craft place I've ever been at (maybe I need to go to more?) -- you could do tie-dye, pottery painting, leather stamping and staining (E made a coaster with bears), glass mosaicing with grout (A made a cube picture-holder), jewelry beading, and then for older kids/adults there is glass fusion and silk painting. (It looks wildly time-consuming, but I'd love to go back and try silk painting sometime...)
D's family reunion is a large affair; his dad's mother was one of thirteen children, and the descendants of all of those are who come to the reunion. (There are 776 living descendants, of which maybe 100 came.) It was fun, although I had a moment of melancholy when I realized that the reason that I didn't recognize anyone was because a lot of the people (from D's dad's family) I'd met and spent time with at previous reunions (the last one we went to was almost ten years ago) had died. On the other hand, there were a lot more brunettes than I remember from the last time we went, and one more POC (another Asian)! It's something else, though -- there was a group singalong with (among other songs) "Edelweiss" and "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," and I'd forgotten the Elbows on the Table Tradition. That is, if anyone sees you with your elbows on the table (the kids are generally the policers of this), a whole chant starts up, with associated clapping:
Cahn, cahn, strong and able
Get your elbows off the table!
This is not a horse's stable
But a first-class dining table!
Round the table you must go, you must go, you must go
Round the table you must go; you were naughty!
(The last two lines are sung to the tune of "London Bridge," and during this time the offender must circle the table. If they don't get back to their seat by the end, another verse is sung.)
I was lucky enough that 2 1/2 of these trips went pretty well in terms of flights being mostly on time, etc. Then we come to our trip back from Denver. I imagine it is because it took D so long to buy the tickets, but anyway we we were scheduled on a Sunday night 7:30 (nonstop) flight back from Denver. Well... that Sunday there were thunderstorms. So our flight got pushed back, and then later (so did D's dad's flight, but fortunately they took off eventually), and then the pilot came out and said to the waiting passengers that they would have to cancel the flight (because of regulations on how long the crew could fly). Thanks United for making that clear! /s (United did officially cancel the flight shortly afterwards, but you'd think they would have known this was a problem before the pilot told us!) A very nice person directed us to a short UA line (the line we'd been waiting in was extremely long) and D managed to divert us to an airport that was "only" 2 1/2 hours away, so then we could rent a car to get home. (There were no flights left to get to our actual airport until Tuesday morning.)
So we did that, renting the car was reasonable, and then half an hour into the trip we started hearing this weird bonking noise (at what I'd estimate as, oh, 3-5 Hz or so) on the car's front right side, which got louder and faster as the car got faster. D exited a couple of times and stopped to look at the car, and didn't see anything overtly wrong -- he was looking for something like a rock or a stick. The third time, he looked more at the tires and saw that a long "string" of rubber had come loose from the tire (!) and was making the bonking sound as it flapped. He cut off the string, but as you might be able to infer, the tire was Not in good shape At All (D showed us where you could start seeing the metal of the wheel under it) and we then diverted again (fortunately we were 15 minutes away from another Avis) and got another car. Happily, as soon as D started saying to the Avis rep that we needed to exchange cars, the rep took one look at the car and said, "Yep, I see that the tires on this aren't looking good..."
Anyway, that was the last issue we had with travel and we got home without any further incident, but also some really good Peruvian-fusion food about an hour from our house, and I'm already trying to figure out how to go back to that place :)
I had 78 squares of A's blanket done before Trip #3; I did three more squares during the course of the trip, and then four more squares during our travel adventures coming home. And yes, that tells you something about how much tiiiime we spent trying to get home.
Then, literally two hours after we got home, my throat started feeling scratchy. The next day I felt OK (except for my throat) until lunchtime, at which point I slept for six hours straight. The day after that I slept until 1pm, and at that time finally tested positive on a covid test. At least I was masked while I was in the airport/airplane, I guess. D and the kids started having symptoms and testing positive about a day afterwards. We're all mostly better now, just some residual tiredness. (The kids are totally better except that they are actually sleeping as soon as they get to bed, which frankly is a plus for me.)
(The funny thing is that -- I expect this is the result of being vaxxed/boosted and the liberal application of ibuprofen? -- I could feel that my body is super in need of sleep/rest, but my brain wasn't fogged up nearly as badly as it it was in Mystery Illness of Feb 2020. The problem was more that I kept needing to lie down after being awake for a couple of hours. But the connection from my brain to my mouth does seem to be affected (and I couldn't talk for several days anyway because my throat was very sore).)
The surprising thing to me is that it took me until trip #3 to get covid! (I had at least one other close contact exposure I know about; Boss got covid after trip #2, and I was in meetings with him literally all day. I'd like to blame it on him/on that trip, but the timing just doesn't work.) But D's reunion was by far more risky than either of my other two trips (given that his family is so large and so geographically spread out, and also in general less worried about covid than my family is), so there's that, and also I suppose it's possible we got it from being in the airport for many many hours on end (but I'm pretty sure that wasn't it, that would have been too close). I will admit that I wasn't as careful as I could have been during the reunion, because I quite frankly didn't see how I could be going to church every week and have two school/camp-aged kids and gone on these other trips and not have gotten whatever the latest variant was already. But, well, apparently I hadn't yet.
The other funny/good thing: as of today, D's dad has not gotten covid yet, which means I think that he won't get sick from the reunion. I'm really happy about this, because he's 82. I'm also kind of shocked, because I think he probably spent a lot more time talking to people at the reunion than we did. But I suppose we were talking to different sets of people... (He also didn't stay in the same room as we did, which I was glad about before because it would have been hard to make that work, but now I'm even more glad because I don't think he could have avoided it if we'd all been in the same room!)
(Did four squares while having covid... now working on square 90.)
no subject
Date: 2022-08-02 06:07 am (UTC)I read the first sentence of that and was thinking to myself, I wonder if they were flying United -- and then you confirmed it. United KEEPS DOING THIS, pushing out flights a little bit at a time, until the crew go over their hours and then they cancel. OK, in fairness, the full thing has only happened to me personally once -- when it took me something insane like 48 hours to get to Japan -- but it was a very memorable experience, and I've been collecting other people's United horror stories since.
The place you stayed in in Colorado sounds awesome! all those crafts! and archery! very cool!
Glad your FIL was able to avoid Covid, even if you were not. (My husband got it while traveling and staying with his 90-year-old mother, but she didn't catch it from him, miraculously. Possibly her second booster at work, but in any case, we were very relieved.)
no subject
Date: 2022-08-02 02:03 pm (UTC)Well, it was a spring snowstorm in Denver and it grounded all the small planes, but yeah, the United Express (some other airline co-branding) flight that was supposed to take me the final leg home was delayed, delayed, delayed, and finally canceled - and the next flight they could put me on was THREE DAYS LATER. I got together with three others who were also on that flight, we cashed in our second-half tickets, rented a 4WD SUV, and drove the 7 hours and 2 passes to get home.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-02 10:29 pm (UTC)it was a spring snowstorm in Denver and it grounded all the small planes, but yeah, the United Express (some other airline co-branding) flight that was supposed to take me the final leg home was delayed, delayed, delayed, and finally canceled
I feel like that's the United MO that I've observed through my own and other people's stories -- there may be some good reason for the initial delay, like a snowstorm, but then the way United manages it from there is with the least possible transparency and customer care.
In my case, there wasn't even an act-of-god reason for the delay, just a bunch of minor mechanical issues (because, I heard later, United had laid off a lot of their mechanics but kept flying their really old fleet) and mismanagement on top of that.
I think my Japan trip was before you and I friended each other on LJ/DW, so I don't think you've heard this story before, but the ~11-hour SFO to Tokyo direct flight of mine ended up involving:
- 2 days (actually, more like 3, because it was morning in SF time by the time we landed in Narita, and the next day in Japan anyway)
- 26 hours at SFO (would've been a lot longer but that I had the option of going home to sleep)
- 32 hours of delay, from the time my original flight was supposed to take off to the time when the make-up flight actually did
- 3 different planes
- 5 different captains/crews
- 5 times boarding the plane (and 4 times getting off)
- 2 complementary cheese + crackers packages (of 2 crackers and one piece of cheese each), 1 package with 2 Oreos in it, 1 can of soda, 2 bottles + 1 glass of water -- the ONLY things we got from the airline in these two days -- and the offer of comped WiFi on the flight, but only if we paid for it first and then applied for a rebate
This was a business trip, so at least I hadn't paid for the privilege, and there was someone on the other end who was managing the churn to my hotels in Japan.
But if there had been an issue to rent a car and drive to Japan, I think a lot of us on this cursed flight would have taken it :P
no subject
Date: 2022-08-03 05:00 am (UTC)My favorite United story isn't so much unpleasant as it is "someone trying to get away with something" -- this was a few years ago now, maybe almost ten years ago; long enough ago that although cell phones were a thing, they weren't quite as no-brainer a solution for everything as they are now. (I don't think I owned a cell phone at the time.) We were flying to Arizona, and the flight was delayed by several hours, "because of fog." (Which of course falls under "weather," so missed connections wouldn't, in theory, be the airline's fault.)
Arizona not being known for its big fog problem, this was already suspicious. Then the half of the people waiting who had cell phones called their friends and relations in Arizona to commiserate/ask about the fog problem, only to be told, "Fog? What fog? It's bright and sunny!" United had to then deal with a lot of angry people... I am pretty sure everyone got hasty rebooking/other compensation of some sort from the airline :)
no subject
Date: 2022-08-03 02:27 pm (UTC)So I said, "Weather? What weather?!"
And I was told, "The weather in Chicago, where the plane that was supposed to be in Albuquerque already and fly you to LA today is stuck."
no subject
Date: 2022-08-05 03:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-04 05:37 am (UTC)Oh dear, that is pretty brazen!
But, yeah, I pretty much just don't believe anything United says anymore. It seems like they have an actual policy of saying whatever they think will get people off their backs, even if it's a pack of lies.
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Date: 2022-08-04 09:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-03 04:47 am (UTC)Yes! It was very cool! Would stay there again! (I'd love to have my immediate-family-of-origin do a reunion there, but my mom and sister are super not into hiking or national parks, so... probably not.)
My FIL as far as I know has not gotten even a first booster (it took all of his children nagging him for him to get the shots at all, not because he's anti-vaccine, but it just... takes him a long time to do anything) so I'm even more amazed he didn't get sick, but hey, I'll take it. Yay for your MIL not getting it too!
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Date: 2022-08-03 09:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-04 05:41 am (UTC)It really seems like this "push a little, push a little, cancel flight, offer completely unacceptable alternative" is United's whole MO. I heard somewhere, though I don't know if it's true, that the reason they do the sequences of small delays, instead of being realistic about the delays/the likelihood of the flight being canceled, is that if they delay by less than a certain amount, they don't have to offer compensation (food vouchers or whatever).
But the result is that I never believe a United flight will actually happen until I'm actually in the air.