Heathrow to Sheraton

Good deal: go to central bus terminal and take 75, 76 or U3 bus for free (and take a five minute walk).

Good deal: arrange w/hotel for a car, £10 between hotel and terminals 1,2,3.
Not a good deal: Hotel Hoppa bus, £4 per person, takes as long as the free bus though gets you to the door of the hotel... Eventually.

Dutch trains not all that after all

Show up for my 12:02 train to Schipol from Eindhoven.  Due to hotel desk having their fire drill practice at 11:45 (when check-out is noon?) and the girl taking extra long on everything, train machines not taking CC (the same machines do at Schiphol) ATM machines giving only bills, train machines tajking only coins, line at ticket window, I miss the 12:02 by one minutes.

No problem, there's a 12:14 going non-stop to the airport arriving 13:46 giving me plenty of time for the 15:00 flight I'm already checked in for.

Except the train is not going past its first stop because it's ... something in Dutch.  So I change trains to Ultrich.  Where we arrive late, and one minute past the train to airport departing.  The next one is 15 minutes later and delivers me to Schiphol at 14:12.  No problem, except the kiosks that are supposed to reprint my BP aren't working and I have to go to a human who takes extra long for some reason (I should be used to that)

Security line is insanely long but UA 1K gold card comes in handy - I'm in the much shorter Premium line which is barely moving. So much for faster.

As I'm getting near the belt it's 2:28 and my flight is starting to board in a couple of minutes and two gentlemen are trying to push their way "excuse me, excuse me, our flight is leaving" I look at their BPs and it says 14:35 - your flight leaves in seven minutes?  No their flight starts boarding in seven minutes.  Well, wait in line along with everyone else, sheesh!

After I go through the metal detector, the dude working there looks at my BP and says "you're in the wrong area" even though I'm leaving from D18 and the signs here all say "All B, C, D gates".  Security guy insists this is only D thirty-something or higher.  The guy next to me is making "don't listen to him faces", I ask "can I get to my gate from here and the security guy says "yes".  So why is he wasting my time?

My careful planned time to check out AMS *A gold lounge and spend my remaining Euros is shot and I rush to the gate through passport control.  I get there 20 min before departure w/sign saying "gate closing" and *another* metal detector and a 10 minute line.

Oh well, no problem. Didn't have to run after all.

_not_ my favorite thing

Showing up to a hotel with a confirmed reservation and finding out the
reservation's been cancelled.

By the idiotic booking tool (or idiotic programmer who wrote it) that
thinks the proper way to handle a change in dates is send a
cancellation, send a rebooking, when the rebooking fails give a general
error, leave the live reservation in my record, send a cancellation on
to the hotel.

Awesome!

Don't ever use www.concursolutions.com

Oh-uh

We're over two hour to Heathrow and they just paged for any medical personnel on my flight to ring their FA button.

Hope this doesn't turn out to be a serious emergency for someone, we're pretty much over nothing, middle of Northern Atlantic.

Flight Plan, Videos, Photos

The flight plan for the coolest flight ever:

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/COA9921/history/20090207/1826Z/KIAH/KIAH/tracklog

The videos I took from the flight:

http://www.youtube.com/asya666

The pictures from the flight and the rest of the weekend DO:

http://picasaweb.google.com/asya999

Coolest. Flight. Evah!

At the Continental DO this weekend in Houston. This morning were the tours. Flight simulator, baggage control center, training facility, catering operation, mystery tour. 

I couldn't remember which one I put in for, but I was hoping to get second shift (10am start instead of 7am). Got the mystery tour.  The late start. 

It turned out to be the "flight to nowhere". High performance take off sharper than from SNA. Low altitude fly-over Houston downtown.  Missed approach and low buzz over Hobby airport.  Flight over Galveston, Corpus Cristi, Austin and back to IAH.

Tour and pictures of the cockpit *in*flight*  majorly cool.  Will post pix and videos... somewhere...

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/COA9921

Hard to hate any scenario more...

You're sitting on your allegedly on-time ATL-CLT US flight, sweating your 39 min connection to IAH. If the ATL was late departing from ATL you could convince CSRs to push your ticket over to one of the non-stops on DL or CO. But you board early and the doors close and you push back slightly ahead of schedule.

As you wait for your turn to take off you hear the engines go off which is never a good thing and your captain announces that you just got a 30 minute hold from ATC.

Great, that gives you about 10 minutes to make your connection from the middle of one concourse to the very end of another. Thanks, Useless Air.

Sure enough, you arrive just with enough time to run to your gate and watch it be closed even though it's 5 min before departure, the monitor you just sprinted past has "Boarding" as the status of the flight and your helpful crew announced that "they knew you were coming".

One of those typical surly gate agents barks that no, she can't let you on the flight and the next one is in about 2.5 hours, which will mean another night of less than five hours of sleep for you. And no dinner voucher because it's not four hours or longer delay.

I can't wait till CO joins *A - later this year I'd be taking the non-stop tonight instead of this disaster.