It’s Wednesday morning and the child bride and I have much to look forward to. Friday, September 13th is the 50th anniversary of our first (blind) date. It was a Friday the 13th back then also. We’ve always considered it our lucky day since, having twice in that 50 year interim, won meat tray raffles in pubs on a Friday the 13th. Put a circle round that date. I can’t remember which pubs or when however. This Friday the 13th has Hurricane Francine blocking our way as we all head towards Louisiana for what I anticipate to be a rather uncomfortable likely flight-cancelling juxtaposition. I suspect we’ll be pretty familiar with San Francisco airport by the time we get our connecting flight to New Orleans.
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Got that right. Our San Fran to New Orleans flight has just been cancelled and we haven’t even left Brisbane yet. Looks like a night in San Fran then a flight to Denver and hopefully a connection to New Orleans. We get there on the 12th instead of the 11th so will still make our date on the 13th. It’s times like this you realise the value in booking through an agent (not something I normally do) and lashing out occasionally to sit at the front of the plane. By the time we heard our flight to New Orleans had been cancelled we were minutes away from boarding – just enough time to ring the agent to get our hotel booking changed and our lift from the airport rearranged, not something I could have done myself. I’m assuming United will put us up in a hotel in San Fran although it’s been an hour since I ordered that red wine so the jury’s still out.
This airline also seems to leave the seatbelt sign on for an inordinate amount of time, even when it’s so calm it feels like we’re standing still. There maybe a reason for this – see previous paragraph – regarding giving the flight attendants hours of time for necessary gossip. Or it could be because Boeing planes have been rather inconveniently losing doors and wheels recently. This plane’s a 787 Dreamliner which leads nicely into this. Already the lights are off, the shades are down and people are pretending it’s night time. It’s the middle of the bloody afternoon and I’m going to chase that glass of red, seatbelt sign or no seatbelt sign.
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We’re now in a hotel in San Francisco (with flowers in our hair). Haven’t encountered any homeless or drug addicts (or both) or been mugged yet, but we’ve only been here a couple of hours most of which was spent wandering aimlessly round the deserted airport like the Walking Dead trying to find someone to talk to. Here was me thinking someone from United would meet us off the plane with a hotel voucher and new boarding passes. How naive. How old-school. Those passes and vouchers do exist because we eventually located them but not without a bit of Poirot and a very helpful United lady who I’m sure wasn’t expecting to be problem solving for idiot foreign tourists at that hour.
Very early start tomorrow. Our New Orleans flight via Denver is confirmed and will arrive hopefully, after the worst of the hurricane has passed through and hopefully leaving some of the bars intact and unflooded. For now we are in our hotel in south San Fran. Not quite Silicon Valley, which is a bit further down the road, but with pretensions – lots of shiny office buildings and no houses. Maybe that’s why the bar and restaurant in our hotel are permanently closed – the nerd community doesn’t drink.
This was going to be a prologue but we’ve sort of stumbled into the holiday proper, albeit in entirely the wrong location. Hopefully have something more interesting to write about in the coming days.