Well, still floating high from an amazing Ryan Bancroft & Joshua Bell performance last weekend, I made my way to Detroit for a conference. The flight out of San Francisco is supposed to take off at 8:25 am but I have meetings before and am risk-averse with my travel timing choices, so I am up at 5 am for my morning routine and hour early.
Checking my phone after initial boot-up, i.e., morning meditation, with the intent to get a better seat to Chicago – I am only in a middle seat right now – I get greeted by the obligatory message “we are looking for passengers to jump on a different flight. Well, switching from SFO-ORD-DTW to SFO-EWR-DTW feels wrong somehow. Overshooting and going back? Well, $600 and the additional miles to get me closer to the 3 million miles on United do the trick, and I am only supposed to come in 20 minutes later. I
n addition, the flight to Chicago had changed equipment late last night to a bigger plane (coming in from Sydney), so I made an educated bet on upgrade chances – #14 – really? – on the upgrade list for Chicago and a middle seat vs. #7 on the upgrade list to EWR and a likely aisle seat. But I digress.
All well on the way to New York – except my company’s InfoSec settings preventing me to call into the meeting I came to the airport early for. We arrive 20 minutes early. My connecting flight is going out of Terminal A – what ? – I haven’t been there in a while. Worried about how Terminal A looks like – after some bad surprises on off-terminals – I walk the shopping-mall / bar that is EWR terminal C to the lounge and have some chicken and beans.
The bus bring me to Terminal A, and to my pleasant surprise it is beautiful and modern, and it has a really nice United lounge next to Gate A27. The bus is also a normal bus. Nothing like the D-day weird busses in Paris Charles De Gaulles.
Arriving at my connector to Detroit, another pleasant surprise is the complimentary upgrade to first.
Things start going wrong when the purser announces “operations just took this airplane out of service and is trying to get us a new plane.” Well, deplaning it is. 15 minutes later they tell us that the new departure time will be 12:26 am (from a 19:00 planned departure) as the incoming equipment comes from Austin.
Considering options. There is a direct 9 pm SPIRIT airlines from EWR to DTW, but no thanks. I am worried that the delayed flight will be canceled due to lack of passengers.
I am calling the team at the United 1K desk. My agent is amazingly friendly and walks me through my options. I have to moderate a session at 11:00 am in Detroit next morning, so the 6:00 am through Washington Dulles that arrives at 10:12 is risky. The delayed flight still has enough confirmed passengers and only 26 passengers changed, so my worries that I am stranded late go away.
The team at the bar in the United lounge makes the delay fun. And we exchange travel war stories with other passengers. The real problem seems to be that the lounge shuts down at 9:30, the Terminal C lounge at 10:30, so it will be quiet. As an upside, the internet will be faster 😉
Checking my original itinerary was a bad idea. If I would have stayed, I would have been 26 minutes away from Detroit as I write this. Oh well. Choices.
Let’s see how this day ends.
10:15 pm: Well, they weren’t wrong. The terminal is dying down fast. My 9 pm meeting is over now. Messages from United are nice and courteous:
The Terminal is getting eerily calm around 11.
2:32 Arrival at the gate in Detroit. Perfectly timed Uber arrives when I arrive at the ride share pick up.
What a day!
StageAficionado 