Friday December 16: San Jose to Boston
More Flight Delays
The travel demons got one final shot at us.
We woke up, had breakfast, packed up, and got out on time. Jose was on time, the traffic wasn't too heavy, so we got to the airport about 3 hours before our flight, or perhaps a bit earlier. We told Jose about our wonderful dinner the previous night, and he said he would pass it on to the tour company.
Then the fun began.
We tried checking in at the kiosk, but like at Boston, it didn't like Sam's passport. We got in line for the counter, and we were supposed to fill out a vaccination attestation, which as these things often seem to be, was a lot more of a pain that it should have been.
Then we got to the counter. We had a fairly short layover in Orlando. I think it was about an hour and a half. The problem, however, was that our flight out of San Jose was delayed by about an hour. That would not leave us enough time to do the transfer in Orlando.
After a bunch of work, the woman (who happened to be named Kenya) arranged for a flight to Fort Lauderdale, and then from there to Boston. The downside is that the first leg left about an hour later than our original flight. Then we had a significantly longer layover in Fort Lauderdale--I think 3-4 hours. The net effect is that we should be getting into Boston around 11:30pm. Basically, we'll just have a very long travel day.
Amy did some shopping at a tourist shop in the airport. We were debating how much more expensive stuff was there than at a similar store outside the airport.
Right now, the plan is to hang out here for another hour or so, and then around noon grab some lunch. We will start boarding soon after 1. We'll fly to Fort Lauderdale, recheck our bags, and grab some dinner. Then we'll fly to Boston.
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Around noon, we noticed that that our flight was delayed. Sam was watching our plane depart Fort Lauderdale. Apparently it just flies from there to here and back again. Based on when it left Florida, we were expecting our flight to be delayed. (Considering that it wasn't scheduled to arrive here until after our originally scheduled boarding time.) Fortunately, we have a long layover in Fort Lauderdale, so this flight being delayed is nothing serious.
We grabbed some lunch in the "food court" and then we headed over towards our gate. We were looking for seats with outlets nearby. They did not seem to exist. Where there were outlets, there were no seats, and where there were seats, there were no outlets. There were a few "juice bars", where you could sit at a bar like thing and plug in, but not surprisingly, those were pretty full.
However...a bit further down the concourse we found whole set of seats that had power built in! At every other gap between seats, there was an outlet and a USB port. That meant that every seat had power next to it, although there might only be one outlet for two people.
Now we are sitting here, with the interminable waiting, but with our devices being recharged. I'm not sure if we'll start boarding in a half hour or in an hour.
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What a day...JetBlue seems to be specializing in flight delays. I think every single flight we've taken on this trip has been delayed. We're currently in Fort Lauderdale, and our flight to Boston is...you guessed it...delayed. I'm guessing that we might land in Boston about 12:30am. If we get the shared van at 1:30, I might get home and to bed by 2:30. At least this is a Friday, and I don't have to get up for work tomorrow morning.
It was a pain going through the airport here. We got off the plane pretty early, but then we had to wait for an eternity for our luggage to come out. All so that we could go to customs, tell them we had nothing to declare, and check the bags back in. Then we got dumped into the main departures area, so we had to go through the security scan again. This time they took a dim view of my carry on bag full of camera gear. They opened it up, put all of the big stuff in a bin, and then ran that and the suitcase through the x-ray machine again. Not earth-shattering, but more hassle on a day full of hassles.
We got some airport fast food, and now we have roughly another hour to wait for our delayed flight...
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There was a bit of an issue with our seats and the rebooking, and apparently the plane wasn't full, so Amy talked with them, and they reassigned us seats near the front of the plane, using every other seat (i.e. window, aisle, aisle, no middles) to give us more space.
The flight up to Boston was uneventful, except for the late hour. We did spend a few minutes idling on the tarmac, waiting for a ground crew to show up and direct the plane into the jet way.
It was sort of strange going through Logan Airport at the late hour (maybe 1:30 AM). The place was deserted except for occasional cleaning crews. Seeing this large wave of humanity slowly shuffling in the same direction through a deserted concourse caused me to picture this as a zombie apocalypse.
We got out of the plane fairly quickly, which of course meant that we had that much longer wait at the baggage claim. There seemed to be the remains of an earlier flight there when we arrived. I'm not exactly sure what happened, but some people got the final bags out, did something, and an alarm went off.
Perhaps because of the late hour and limited staff, it took forever for them to turn the very annoying alarm off. Amy and I blocked our ears (as did many other people), but eventually my arms got tired, and I dug out my noise canceling headset, put that on, and turned it on. I could still hear the alarm, but it wasn't nearly so annoying. Eventually, after rather a long while, someone turned the alarm off, and I could put my headphones away.
Eventually our luggage arrived. This is a good thing, because it was cold outside, and we were still dress for Costa Rica. I pulled out my red fleece jacket (whose primary purpose on the trip was this return journey), down vest, and rain hat. Sam just had on shorts and a tee-shirt, so I gave her the vest and I wore the fleece jacket.
It turns out I didn't need the rain hat. At the international terminal (Terminal E), you wait for the van outside exposed to the rain. But since we had gone through immigration in Florida, this was a domestic flight and we flew into Terminal C. Here, the area for shared vans was under a roof.
We emerged from the airport in the middle and proceeded to the upstream end of the area, to wait for the van to arrive. On our previous trip, we had to wait rather a while, which was why I wanted the jacket. As we settled to wait, however, I looked down the length and saw a van parked at the far downstream end. Telling Amy to watch my bags, I went down there to check it out. As I got closer, I saw that it was a Knight's van, and when I got the attention of the driver, I found out that he was waiting for us.
I hurried back to Amy and Sam, and we proceeded to drag our luggage down to the other end, board the van, and head out. Not surprisingly, at that hour the traffic was almost non-existent, and we made good time. I semi-dozed for a bit as we went along. At this point, the rain was more of a light drizzle than a real rain.
We got home just about 3am. I did the minimum unpacking that I needed to do, and hit the sack--the end of a very long day.