Monday, April 2, 2012

Travel Day: SFO-LGB

Sunday was another early morning wake up with breakfast at the executive lounge. Most of the students opted to wake up early enough to eat before heading to the airport at 7:30am. When I checked-out all of us they said that their system was down and that they would need to email me the receipts. Fine with me. We boarded the shuttle around 7:40am and headed to SFO. When we arrived at the international terminal, it was quite empty and the two chaperones dropped off our bags at the counter. Every single one of the students did carry-on. I hate fighting for overhead space these days now that airlines charge per bag so I decided to check my bag. Also, Jetblue doesn't charge for the first bag; so why not check it? Oh, I was also able to check everyone in for the flight the day before online and print out boarding passes for everyone in the executive lounge of the hotel. Gotta love hotel business centers.

We all proceeded to the security check with a very short line, but it took forever to get through. I think they had brand new recruits working that shift because they couldn't figure out anything. There was one lady checking boarding passes before allowing you into the line. She yelled at one of my students because she had two carry-ons and her purse out, which looked like 3 carry-ons. She told her to go back to the airline desk. She also told her to step aside to figure it out. I was really irritated at this point, but had gone through ahead of her so I wasn't able to help ease the situation. Thankfully my student had enough sense to tell her that her purse was in one of the bags and she only got it out to get her ID out, which wasn't even necessary yet. So once we were all in line for security it took us at least 30 minutes to get through. Mind you that there were only two planes in the whole terminal--ours and a Hawaiian Airlines plane. It was insanity. They only had one security line going and that included the one for crew and premium passengers. Crazy. Then they opened more lines and still went slow because they were moving people to the crew line and then moving them out into the others. One of the supervisors was getting into it with the guy controlling the lines because there wasn't supposed to be a backed-up line in the crew line. It was dreadful. Then we all get through the body scanner and I made sure that I was the very last person in our group in case they pulled one of the students out of the line for liquids or something stupid. Once we got through security they made the "final call" for our flight throughout the terminal and we had to get all the way through to the end of the terminal. I'm glad I ate breakfast before and wasn't counting on eating in the terminal because there was no time by this point.

When we boarded there wasn't a lot of overhead space left and the last student in our group was in front of me. He found a spot to put his bag and I started helping him and moved bags around up there. This guy sitting on the aisle said "be careful that bag up there is fragile," and I gave him the stink eye. I wanted to tell the guy "if it's so fragile then put it down by your feet where you can watch it." It took us a while to move things around and finally get his bag in the overhead bin. I was waiting for the idiot to say something again about his fragile crap. I was ready to unleash on this guy, but he kept his mouth shut. Even writing about this now gets me worked up about it. I guess it wouldn't have been good for me to have my students see me get into an altercation on an airplane and get whisked off to airport jail.

So I make it to my window seat and the two women in the row already decide they don't want to get up and I have to squeeze between them to my seat. I just watched my TV and looked out the window. Once we took off, my TV/XM radio decided that it didn't want to work anymore. It was frozen and wouldn't change modes or channels. Oh well. Thankfully I had my iphone (in airplane mode).
An uneventful hour-long flight went by and we actually landed about 15 minutes early. The one thing I absolutely love about the Long Beach airport is using the stairs to board and deplane. It feels so retro and I love being able to experience the enormity of the wings and engines.
Here's the last look of Blue Velvet.

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