Can We Get a Jet Bridge?

Have you ever sat in your seat and watched the gate agent steer the jet bridge out to the plane? It’s a tedious process that involves a joystick straight out of a video gram control set and also a lot of dinging and beeping. Frequently the jet bridges edges out toward the plane, then left a bit, then backward, now right, forward again, left, right, left, backward, until finally we have contact and it’s safe to deplane without plunging onto the tarmac below. Not this time. The jet bridge would swing forward and then immediately backward, never making any real progress.

Fortunately, we had a tenacious ground crew. They attempted this futile exercise for 30 minutes before declaring the jet bridge broken. I had a 45 minute layover. This left 15 minutes for passengers to restow carry-on luggage and retake their seats, flight crew to ensure we were all safe and sound for the five minute drive to the gate on the opposite side of the terminal, ground crew to secure cargo compartments and unhook the fuel lines, and the plane to leave one gate and arrive at another. Never. Going. To. Happen. I should add that it had been an entirely smooth trip up to this point, with smooth connections in the midst of winter weather. My enterprising colleague reserved us a rental car at that point as, naturally, there were no other flights that day or the next. The drive was only 80 miles. Punctuated by a multi-mile backup caused by a massive RV fire. The gods were having a good time that day, the travelers not so much.

Flying to the Middle of Nowhere

As I said in my previous post, this blog began when I was bound for California with colleagues and couldn’t get farther than Salt Lake City. We were headed to Merced, California, whose nearest airports are Modesto and Fresno. Delta does not fly to Modesto and offers two flights each day from Salt Lake City to Fresno. We had missed the first flight; the second was full. For an hour the customer service rep tried to rebook four of us onto a flight that would get us somewhere in the vicinity of Merced. One-by-one he tried the airports in California, checking the mileage as he went. There is no quick and efficient way to do this, unfortunately. As the airports became farther and farther from our destination he grew frustrated. “My God, you’re going to the middle of nowhere!” he exclaimed, then thought better of it. “I’m so sorry,” he added quickly, but not to worry – so were we. There were no flights to northern or central California that day. We could fly into San Jose at 6am the following morning. Jackpot!

Introducing the Tenacious Traveler

I have never been in a plane crash. It’s probably fair to assume that you haven’t either. I begin with that statement, though, because I have encountered what seems like every other possible travel tie-up. In fact, a series of this-only-happens-to-you delays and missed connections is directly responsible for this blog.

A few weeks ago I was in the Salt Lake City airport with three colleagues. We had missed our connecting flight to Fresno because of a defect in the floor of the cargo compartment. Does this mean suitcases would have rained down on Kansas? I can’t say, but in the time it took to fix the defect, our connection was sunk. My colleagues were miffed, to say the least. They had wanted to cancel before we began. The trip came on the heels of a monster winter storm and they were not unjustifiably concerned about our connections. And the beginning was inauspicious. We took off from the airport only after the ground crew was able to thaw the deicing equipment. (You know it’s cold when…) I assured my colleagues temperatures of 25 below were no reason to cancel.

I was right, of course. A defective floor could happen any day of the year, obviously. My colleagues were a bit on edge. I, however, was rather zen: this sort of thing happens to me all the time. Really. Tales of my mishaps filled our time and my (frankly dumbfounded) colleagues declared 1) they were never traveling with me again and 2) I really, really needed to start a blog.

So here I am. This space is where I will share my travel woes (misery never loved company more than on an airplane where every last passenger has missed their connection), my travel tips, the occasional travel-gadget-review, and a few of my favorite places. Some stories will be old, some will be brand spanking new, but for better or worse all will be true.

Happy travels!