June 22, 2004
Into the Wild Blue Yonder
Well it's 10:30pm and I'm on a flight bound for Philadelphia. Ultimately I'm going to find my way to London, but that'll be after a couple red-eyes with an adventure in the middle.
Let me explain.
This isn't the first time I've made the mistake of paying poor attention to details when booking air travel somewhere. I have this habit of thinking I know my flight itinerary and then getting a surprise a couple hours before my supposed flight when I actually go to check the departure time. This time, however, the joke was a pretty cruel one.
Somehow I thought my travels involved leaving Los Angeles at the brisk hour of 6am, stopping over for a few hours in Philadelphia and then finishing the flight to London on a red-eye, arriving about a day later. Don't ask me where I got that idea, because my actual reservation was something quite different.
I was destined to leave Los Angeles at 10:00 at night, arrive in Charlotte, NC at 6am the following day for a 12 hour layover followed by a flight to Philadelphia and then another connection to the London flight, getting me to England two days after my departure!
I tried calling up US Airways to see if there might be a way to change the flight to something more sane; there was an afternoon flight to Philadelphia that could have connected quite nicely to the London leg—a simple two-segment flight instead of a three-segment flight with 12 hour layover. Unfortunately, they wanted over $1400 to change the ticket. I asked if I showed up at the airport early if I could fly standby and manage the better route, but they said standby flight changes had to be during the same day. My alternate route would have me leaving for London a full day earlier.
I was screwed. There was no way out of it. And suddenly the whole absurdity of my situation made me laugh. You know, had the flight itinerary been just a little less insane I could have very easily stewed and suffered, upset over my misfortune and oversight and over the airline's stubborn rules. But instead I just felt a wave of unusual mirth. Why should I suffer when I can make an adventure out of it all?
So I looked up the bus routes in Charlotte, NC, found some people over there in an Internet chat room, asked if there was a nice park where I might nap under a shady tree. I also figured I would make good use of my camera and chronicle the next three or four weeks abroad. It would be an adventure!
I got my friend Sean to take me to the airport. As a bribe I've installed some software on his computer and set him up with an experimental short film we're working on. We hung out at his apartment for a few hours and then he dropped me off at the airport.
I arrived a full two hours early and discovered by 10:30pm flight was going to be an hour late. I also noticed that there was a direct flight to Philadelphia leaving at 10pm, so I sauntered over to the counter of that flight and asked if they could put me on that flight. I would get out of LAX about an hour and a half earlier, I would skip an entire segment of my trip, and my free day would be spent in Philadelphia instead of Charlotte. The flight was actually overbooked (image that: an overbooked red-eye!) but somehow they came through, and now I'm about three hours away from the East Coast!
We'll see what I pull off in Phili. I've got half a mind to catch the train to New York and spend a couple hours terrorizing Bob. Or I could curl up under a shady tree in some park and read my new copy of the Bill Clinton book "My Life".
Posted by Murray Todd Williams at June 22, 2004 10:23 PM