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| love flying |
Since DH and I recently traveled by plane to Hawaii, I thought I'd post some of the obstacles we encountered... prior to booking, upon booking, at airports, and onboard. Most were things we were aware of and had discussed prior to the trip, but some were not... and I consider all 'a learning experience'.
Part of it was the fact that we had never traveled quite that far or quite that long in over 20 years. Things have changed... not only with us, but with flying.
1. Luggage: How much luggage would we need for a week? We generally fly with just a carry-on, so borrowing or buying a larger piece of luggage would be necessary. And since we usually fly Southwest where there is no charge for luggage, adding a fee needed to be considered.
2. Price of tickets: And again... obviously we're not big travelers, so having first checked for cheap flights, we soon realized that if you get a really cheap flight, you have no 'guaranteed seating'... (unless you pay an extra fee??). So it's possible we wouldn't be seated together. For a short flight that might be fine. But for a 10 hour flight - not so much.
3. Time of Flight: Also since time and age has descended on me, I'm not good at getting up extremely early (in the dark)... and it takes me a lot longer to get myself together (I've always moved pretty slow, but now it's worse). So we needed to consider only flights that departed from noon on... figuring we'd have to be there 2 hours early anyway.
4. Layover 1 (going to Hawaii): We saw that layovers can be from 55 minutes to 24 hours. Well, we certainly didn't want to hang around an airport for 24 hours - who would? So we chose the shortest layover we could find... 55 minutes. Well, that was a mistake as even though the plane landed on time, it took almost 30 minutes to deplane (full flight and us in the back). Then there was construction going on in the terminal, so they changed our connecting flight gate to one in another terminal which could only be gotten to by bus. The bus went less than 5 miles/hr and made numerous stops - so although we DID make the flight, we were probably among the last to board. We won't make that mistake again. We're old... and don't move that fast.
We didn't ask about making our connection until we got into the terminal... but it seems like it would have been nice if they had made an announcement such as "Please allow those who have connecting flights leaving soon to deplane first".
There is more... such as legroom, distance from facilities, window vs aisle, etc... but I will continue in my next post. As I stated at the beginning, this was definitely a 'learning experience'.
Thanks so much for dropping by. If I could I would serve you a cup of tea/coffee and a piece of the Bourbon Pecan Coffee Cake I made for DH today. It turned out pretty good.
Hugs,
- Rian