Awesome answer!

I'm at Boston Logan airport waiting to meet someone.  His flight is running late.  I see people coming out of the terminal.  I ask one of them:

Which flight are you from?

She answers:

Boston.


Uh - thanks?

A couple of firsts

Was listening to channel 9 on my SFO-BOS flight today.  First they say:

United xxx cleared for take-off ...
Then as we start rolling we get a
United xxx cancel take-off

Our pilot actually asked after aborting if he heard right - we were first cleared and then uncleared for take-off which ATC confirmed.  I guess they decided there wasn't enough room after all...

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.

Oh my ears!

Having to wait on the station platform for an extra fifteen minutes while there are TVs screaming because the person who set the volume must have been deaf sucks the worst.

And really, it doesn't matter if I understand what the TV is hollering or not.  It's annoying as all hell.

Missed it by this much

Missing the train by 20 seconds and watching doors close as you're entering the station because you were stuck behind some slowpokes - sucks.

Missing the train by less than two seconds and having the doors close on top of your nose - sucks much much worse.

There are still smoking sections in the world?

Only the most idiotic space planner would put a smoking section in a restaurant next to the buffet. 

The fact that there are still smoking sections in eating establishments somewhere in the world is a rant of its own.

The only thing I hate about China

Damn, those locals talk on their cellphones everywhere and they are *loud*!!!

Especially annoying: on a long distance train, and in a nice, otherwise quiet restaurant.

Wow, just wow

I've stayed at some very impressive hotels in the last ten years.  Le Royal Meridien Shanghai room I just checked into is by far the most impressive. 

I was practically speechless for a few minutes.  And if this is what Gold gets you, I can't even imagine the kind of room that Platinium would get.
Pictures will show up on flickr as soon as I gather my wits about.

Whoa, elevator!

In Nanjing Sheraton, you come to a central station in lobby and punch in the floor you want to go to.  It gives you the letter of the elevator to take.  You go to that elevator.  There are no controls inside.  It takes you to your floor. 

Cool.

Getting a Chinese Visa

Seems simple enough - come in person to Chinese Consulate, drop off your application, pay, come up for pick-up 1, 3 or more days later, depending on how much you paid extra.

I get here at 1:25pm and take a number.  It's 306.  They are serving... 195.  But that's not too bad, there are five windows and most people are out of there in less than a minute.  So, 110 numbers, maybe half an hour, right?

Wrong!

First thing I notice is that three of the windows haven't taken a number in a while and in fact there is no one there.  After an hour, one of the two open windows also stops taking new numbers!  This will take hours!  After another half an hour one of the other windows gets a move-on, but still, it's been almost 80 minutes and they've gotten through 45 numbers.

And that's with many people being no-shows given how they look at their number and give up.

Grr. 

So why don't they accept this by mail???

How I know we'll be in Chicago for a while

Maybe we'll get there early but our plane to LGA just left for DFW where it's expected 35 minutes late, delaying its very tight turn around by about that, meaning its 40 minute turn-around to LGA will be delayed as well.

Luckily due to winds it also was going to pick up 15 minutes en route DFW-ORD so maybe we'll only leave 20 minutes late and if winds to the East keep up, maybe we'll only be 10 minutes late into LGA, and these days, 10 min late is just like getting in early these days.

Good news - bad news

Good news: tail winds have us scheduled into ORD 30 minutes early.

Bad news: lightening strikes here at SFO caused ground personnel to be sent back indoors before they were done fueling us/loading luggage.

Let's hope they balance each other out.

Why can't you people take your assigned seats?

Listen up, Vacation Warriors!

When the GA announces it's going to be a full flight, and this is not Southwest, it means take your assigned seat.  That means if your boarding pass says "12E", do not sit in 12F, and then when the 12F occupant gets there don't go to the back of the plane to look for another window seat.

It means don't take any two seats together because you can't be bothered to pull out your boarding pass to check which are actually assigned to you, and if you have window and middle, don't take window and aisle and spread out hoping that the aisle will magically stay unassigned.

Thank you.

Karma is good

Well, I thought I already got my karma payback for losing p.s. F seat over Xmas to an old 767 when I got to ride in new reconfigured C from JFK last month in the most comfortable seat ever. 

Well, this morning waiting for my delayed SFO-JFK with an already cleared upgrade to p.s. C, I hear them say they won't need volunteers to bump and then I hear my name called.  Yes, it's an op-up to p.s. First class!  Yay!  Now let's hope the delay stays minimal as this will already cause me to miss the trains I was going to take to NJ (AirTrain to LIRR to NJTransit).