Adventures in airports

I forgot to print out Frank's itinerary but I knew he was on the 11:44 flight from Philadelphia. Not too hard, right? Philadelphia to San Francisco is not one of those flights like Los Angeles to San Francisco where there can be several arriving at the same time. Also, because we allowed an extra half hour to park and pick him up, and for some reason it took an hour instead of an hou and a half to get there, we were an hour early. Confident.

So I -- thinking that he would not have gone through customs at Philadelphia -- said we were just going to have to hang out in the vast vault of the international terminal for a while. But we didn't see anything on the monitor that corresponded with his flight. So we asked, and were told that he was going to be at terminal 3 (one of three domestic terminals). We got worried when we didn't see what we were looking for on the domestic monitor either. So we looked in my email correspondence, where Frank had corrected my impression of his arrival time, which told us I had the airline wrong.

So far it has been a comedy of my errors. We will gloss over the fact that at one point I remembered the airline incorrectly.

So we went to the desk of the correct airline and the woman there roundly denied that they had any more flights coming in from Philadelphia. The only flight they still had coming in, right now at 11:30 (yes, this has taken an hour, running around the airport), is from Las Vegas. I'm doubtful but I've been a doofus all night, so maybe I missed a leg of the flight and he's not flying from Philadelphia? I could be wrong, because at one point I had thought he had a direct flight from Munchen. I've been wrong about a lot of things.

So we watch the Las Vegas flight debark. No orange guy. Emma checks outside. No orange guy. We check baggage. No orange guy.

At this point I remember that my sent mail will have a complete and detailed copy of his itinerary so I swipe my card for a second time at a pay-to-surf terminal and after checking both email accounts because I can't remember which one I used (I usually like to use my cruzio one for correspondence and my gmail one for chat to keep things straight, but lately gtalk has been showing up in gmail windows and it's all gotten muddy) I see that I was right, it was straight from Philadelphia, and now we have the flight number.

Using the flight number Emma easily finds it on the monitor, with the note that it is both a US Air flight and a United flight, and a big note that it is at TERM (illegible). Because the letters are large for this, the number is cut off. We decide that the US Air lady was confused because the flight was coming in as a United flight and therefore is at Terminal 1 instead of Terminal 3. By this time there's nobody to ask. And it's just going 11:40.

And by this time the Air Train that takes you from terminal to terminal has shut down one of its routes so the other one has to do the long loop in the wrong direction from where we're going and it takes fifteen minutes to get to Terminal 1.

Where there is no such thing as that United Flight.

Emma has a rush of brains when she sees the information terminal: which didn't exist in Terminal 3. She types in the flight number and finds that it was always at Terminal 3 and that it is on time.

So back we go to Terminal 3: we're going in the right direction this time. We assure ourselves that Frank is going to be grumpy, but that's not abnormal.

When we arrive at Terminal 3 we first see that the flight is delayed, and that is reassuring, and then when we're actually at the gate the monitor announces that the flight has landed. Oh good, we're just in time. So I stake out the gate. We realize a few people have gotten out before we got there, so Emma goes to check the curb. Nope. When the last of the flight crew walks out I get that sinking feeling, but not as bad as last year because I've been through this before.

All this time I've been sure that Frank would travel light with no checked luggage. So now we go downstairs to check the other curb and the baggage carousel.

He's standing at the baggage carousel in a completely zen frame of mind. He said he had a moment when he didn't see us but he's been through this before also so he just went to baggage and figured it would all sort out.

We shouldered his many bags (he brought home all he owns) and came home by way of Santa Cruz Diner so he could have pancakes with maple syrup. The next day he rolled out of bed and got a burrito at Tacos Vallarta and went to a coffee shop.

He's in great shape. Nothing seems to faze him anymore. He said yes, airplane travel is uncomfortable and it's hard to sleep in airports, but hey, he flew from Munchen to San Francisco in less than 24 hours! He flew!

And when the subject of bureaucratic inconvenience comes up, he pulls out his arrest record from Czech Republic (in Russian, because it was the Foreign Police, and therefore the paperwork is in Foreign) and says bureaucracy can't bother him any worse than that, so hey, it's just stuff.

But he does say that when the Czech Republic turns into whatever it's going to turn into next he won't miss it (the longest-lasting sovereign state that has lasted in the area surrounding Prague was the Warsaw Pact Czechoslovakia: if you say the Holy Roman Empire, rempire that it was redefined and its boundaries redrawn after every short generation).

On another front, I had decided I wanted the dog, but the vet had already found a home for him.

And either I have the flu or the anti-flakiness medicine is having rather heavy side effects.