My mother told me this traveler-doesn’t-have-a-clue story yesterday morning after I picked her up at the Greyhound bus station in Columbus, Ohio.
I posted about this yesterday, but I’m still shaking my head and wondering where the woman is today and what she has found to eat. Perhaps she’s in Missouri?
It has reminded me of other travel stories when there is nothing else to do but keep on keeping on–and hopefully, eventually, you’ll get to where you want to go. It’s also to make you feel better if you’ve ever made a travel mistake. I’ve made mistakes, but not quite like this.
Here is the recap:
“Where are you going?” My mother asked the woman who got on the bus in Newark, New Jersey.
“Los Angeles,” the woman said.
“My!” said my mother. “That’s far. When will you get there?”
“Tomorrow.” The woman, according to my mother, sounded confident.
“Tomorrow?!” my mother exclaimed.
Mind you, they are on the bus on the east coast. The U.S. hasn’t shrunk.
The woman nodded, still sure.
In Pittsburgh, the woman discovered the truth. She won’t arrive in Los Angeles until Saturday, I think sometime tomorrow night. It is a looooonnnnnng ride.
My mother said that the woman spoke with an accent , so perhaps she misunderstood the details, or she never asked for the details. I wonder if her ticket gave her an inkling that something was amiss? Regardless, she’s somewhere the middle of the U.S. by now and by tomorrow night she’ll be in L.A.
This reminds me a little bit of the problem when planning international travel that involves crossing the International Date Line. When we lived in Asia I always double checked to make sure I understood exactly what day it would be when I would arrive somewhere. Missing a day can wreck havoc on plans if you’re not careful.
Or there are the mistakes where you head east instead of west or the other way around. I know someone who was driving to Washington, D.C., from Columbus, but didn’t discover he had gone the wrong way until he hit Indiana or thereabouts. He had recently immigrated to the U.S. which added to his sign reading difficulties and reluctance to ask for directions.
Think your airport sucks? It’s ok, most people don’t like their local airports. But you’re in a pretty sad state of affairs when even the employees that work at that airport think it sucks.
That’s what’s been going on at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) recently. Employees, union members and even J D Power and Associates notables have been marching around the terminals protesting the state of the airport and the industry.
I can see where they’re coming from with regard to the airport — Terminal 2, where I spend most of my time is a run down shell of a terminal, where amenities are few, gates are crowded and dirty and a combo meal at Burger King can cost up to twelve dollars.
Just earlier this week, local Los Angeles news reported that there were over a thousand people in line over at Terminal 1.
With regard to their qualms with the industry, I’m not sure if they have much traction. Airlines are cutting back in all facets of the business, including, I’m sure, employee staffing. Any time layoffs and superfluous cost cutting are involved, employees are going to be unhappy.
Luckily, none of this ruckus seems to be (further) affecting airport operations — as of this afternoon, the FAA isn’t reporting any significant delays.
My mom just arrived back in Columbus this morning at 7 a.m. from her trip to New York City on a Greyhound bus. The bus was one minute early. Wow! I thought that she’d be late due to the wicked thunderstorm that tore through here all last night.
When I pulled into a non-parking space in front of the station (there was just enough room to maneuver behind another car actually parked at a meter), there she was with her small pull behind that she was allowed to carry-on. If she had checked it there would have been no charge.
One more point for Greyhound.
As I posted previously, my mom took the Greyhound because it was cheaper and easier than flying at the time she found out she needed to get to New York. That still seems to be the case.
Unless, you are the woman my mother told me about who got on in Newark, New Jersey.
“Where are you going?” My mother asked her.
“Los Angeles,” the woman said.
“My!” said my mother. “When will you get there?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?!” My mom wondered how that could be.
That couldn’t be. When they changed buses in Pittsburgh, the woman found out she didn’t have a clue. She won’t arrive in Los Angeles until Saturday.
My mom said she had an accent, so perhaps when someone explained the trip details, she missed something. Obviously.
I hope she didn’t have much planned for the next couple of days and thought to bring a good book with her–or several. If nothing else, she snagged the best travel mistake story I’ve heard in awhile.
(In case you’re wondering. If you go from New York to Los Angeles, it will take 2 days, 12 hours and 25 minutes minimum and you would have had to make one bus change. Some schedules take longer with two transfers.You will have traveled 3072 miles. It costs $192 if you don’t want a refundable ticket or $215 if you do. There is one ticket left for today’s bus that leaves at 11 a.m.)
United and Continental published a round of super cheap fares mostly originating from Newark and into Honolulu last night for travel starting this fall into early next year.
I’m pulling up prices under 300$ total for multiple itineraries on Travelocity. Most weekends and holidays are blocked out, but if you’re going to Hawaii you’re going to want to take a couple of extra days off anyway, aren’t you?
To find the fare, go to Travelocity.com and plug in EWR or LAX and HNL or LIH for your departure and arrival airports. Then select “flexible dates” and select May – December.
The search engine will return a variety of prices and availabilities therein; you can try the lowest fare to find dates that might work, or if availability is too tight try something more expensive.
It helps to consider the flex search as more of a general than a precise tool. If you find ballpark dates that might work for you, scoot over to Kayak or Mobissimo to do another search and do your booking — that way you don’t have to deal with going back and forth between cheapest fares and dates, making yourself all frustrated and cursing my name.
Availability for the cheapest fares from Los Angeles are harder to come by, but are there. Try tinkering around with the lowest few fares in the Travelocity search to find dates that work for you or if necessary, turn off the flex search option and just do +/- 3 day searches to work around your schedule; the first few searches I tried failed, but I ended up eventually finding midweek travel in September for 344$ total.
No telling how long this secret sale will work, so book soon and ask questions later.
There’s a bit of strategy involved with being a pilot on reserve. At least that’s the case at our company. On any given day there may be 4 our 5 reserve pilots qualified at the base to fly a particular airplane and division (domestic or international, for example.) If another pilot calls in sick or if there’s an unassigned trip the next day, crew scheduling will assign a trip to the most junior pilot first, unless that pilot has more flight time for the month than the other pilots on reserve. If everyone is equal, a senior pilot may either choose to fly a trip or pass it along to the next pilot.
Why would someone choose to go to work when they don’t have to?
They might want to take a two day trip tomorrow instead of a four-day trip the day after. Or they may prefer the destination or even the pilot they’d be flying with. I usually try to hold out for an interesting destination if I can.
However, due to a lack of pilots on the reserve list, more often than not you won’t have any choice when crew scheduling calls. We may be short of pilots, but at least my airline hasn’t resorted to using this kind of tactic to fill a trip. Camille or Myra will usually call the night before to let you know that you’ll be flying a trip the next day. That was the case last weekend when they ran out of reserve pilots domestically and needed someone to fly a two-day trip to Los Angeles. I wondered what I’d do in L.A. for 24 hours. I looked up who the captain was and I was thrilled to see it was Bill, an exceptional pilot, who I always enjoyed flying with. It seems like half of my domestic trips are with Captain Bill. We tend to talk about airplanes for most of the flight. Not Boeing products, mind you, but small planes or as some like to say, “real flying.”
You might be surprised to learn that most pilots don’t fly small planes anymore. Some like to say that they can’t imagine doing any flying after coming home from work, and others just don’t feel they can afford it. I’m rapidly slipping into the latter category. Having grown up around ‘little’ airplanes, I could never imagine giving up flying them completely, but now that I have a family and home, it’s hard to find any extra money to pay for $5 a gallon fuel.
Bill has it figured out though. He avoids flying larger cross country airplanes such as a Beechcraft or Cessna, and sticks with the low and slow variety. Airplanes that give you the most “fun per dollar” as I like to say. He lives on a lake in Massachusetts and flies a light sport airplane he calls his contraption out of his back yard. It’s an amphibious biplane that looks like a blast to fly. I’m sure most other pilots think he’s crazy, but once you’ve flown this kind of airplane with fantastic visibility and the ability to splash down almost anywhere you just can’t give it up. And he’s burning car gas at the rate of about 4 gallons an hour. That’s $14 an hour to operate not including any maintenance.
About the only time I’m able to fly small planes has been when I go fly a friend’s or a relative’s airplane, like we did on a San Francisco layover in December, or my brother Kurt let’s me borrow one of his airplanes. Kurt moved 1000 miles away to Michigan, so this isn’t very easy anymore. There’s always that elusive captain upgrade, when I hope to buy this. If I can just convince my wife, of course.
The flight out to L.A. gave me a chance to get a few scenic pictures. I enjoy the view down below and we don’t get as much to look at when we’re flying international trips over the Atlantic or Caribbean sea. I snapped some pictures over the Rockies and just east of Las Vegas I took a few pictures of Lake Mead, which researchers are saying could dry up in fifteen years. At least it will make it easy to get to this airplane that’s at the bottom of the lake. I’d love to get a closer view of this extraordinary area of the country someday.
We flew over the Big Bear ski resort and Red Rock Canyon just west of Las Vegas which looked great. These gallery pictures below are best viewed large. Click on any of them to get the full view.
%Gallery-18959%
The arrival into LAX was uneventful. Bill was nice enough to give me the Westbound leg. It was a kind gesture since we were flying a 767 there and a 757 back. I owe him one. As I’ve mentioned on my last 767 trip, it’s a nice treat to fly the larger airplane.
So what big plans did I come up with for the long Los Angeles layover? Lots of sleep, a burrito for lunch at Chipotle and dinner with Bill at a Japanese place. An exciting layover for us! But I just can’t pass up those fresh Chipotle burritos and the WiFi in the hotel kept me occupied. It’s so tough to get anything done at home with kids in the house, so I often get my blogging done on a layover–this time finishing the training story from last week.
Surprisingly, I haven’t had any excessive delays since I started writing about my trips 15 months ago. With all the stories in the press of late flights and stranded passengers, you would think I’d seen more of this. My luck ran out on Saturday though. Our airplane that we were taking to Boston was about an hour late arriving at LAX. As it landed, it flew through some heavy construction dust that was blowing across the runway. Enough in fact, for the mechanics to decide the engines needed a borescope inspection. Since that would take our airplane out of service for the day, we had to wait a few hours for another airplane to arrive. After a 5 hour delay, we landed in Boston at 2:30 in the morning. Because I slept 12 hours on this layover I wasn’t feeling the least bit tired.
Thanks for all the comments and the great response. We’re going to start a weekly feature called “Plane Answers” in a few days. Anything you’re curious about, feel free to email me. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll surely find someone who does.
I’ll leave you with this video showing more of the view from this office window taken over the past year.
Cockpit Chronicles takes you along on each of Kent’s trips as a co-pilot on the Boeing 757 and 767 out of Boston.