I was scheduled to depart YVH on a lovely floatplane Sun 19 Nov
10:00, have some long and dreary layovers, and finally land in PVD
Mon 20 Nov 01:25, which is a mere 12:25 later. (James scoffs!
Magdelena harrumphs! The Scholgers start to sneer, but quickly
suppress it; Peter is too hung over and jet-lagged to notice that
12.5 hours is a bit excessive[1].)
Floatplane was canceled due to high winds in Seattle. I spent a
panicky hour at my AirB&B searching around, and found a flight that
would get me into PVD Mon 20 Nov 11:49 (I think it was) for only
~$550. But 2 minutes later, when I went to buy it, Travelocity
announced the price had gone up. It was now $1002! So I looked some
more, and found another @ ~$560 that got me in Mon 20 Nov 13:56.
That's > 2 hours worse (they left YYJ at the same time), but
certainly the difference did not seem worth $500 of TEI's money. So I
took it.
I then went and had lunch at a diner (Pluto's on Cook -- I recommend
it), and then took busses (the 14 to the 72 to the 88) to the
airport, arriving almost 2 hours after I left the diner.
After being grilled quite thoroughly by security (why are you asking
me for the 3rd time if I packed my own bag?), the flight from YYJ to
SEA was largely uneventful. (Pilot predicted landing a few mins early
despite departing a few mins late, but we had to circle around due to
reports of bad downdrafts near the runway, so ended up a few mins
late. No problem.)
After an ~5 hour layover, the red-eye flight from SEA to ORD was no
problem, although I got almost no sleep. Flight from ORD to IAD
boarded exactly on time. Then we sat there for almost an hour due to
same maintenance documentation delay. Given that I had only an ~50
min layover in IAD to get from one terminal to another, there was no
chance of making the connecting flight to PVD.
So I was re-booked to a later flight,[2] and had another ~6 hour
layover. I was scheduled to (and did) arrive in PVD at ~19:00, ~17.6
hours late, missing a (minor) medical appointment. I then had to take
busses to get to my car (which was at the repair shop), and got home
at ~20:40, which was over 3.5 hours late for my EMS shift. And, of
course, I was completely exhausted after essentially doing nothing
but traveling or planning travel since Sun 19 Nov 08:30 (11:30 ET),
i.e. ~33 hours. Sigh. (BTW, that "nothing" included almost no sleep,
but at least lots of work on tickets. :-)
I got to bed circa 22:45 and slept for nearly 13 hours.
Notes
-----
[1] The usual is around ~11 hours; I've done it in as little as ~7.6,
and as long as ~13.9.
[2] One thing I will say that United did well in this, is that on
landing at IAD I went to the customer service desk, and they had
already re-booked me on the next available flight out, and
printed up a boarding pass. They just had to print my (measly
$10) meal voucher and hand them to me. Very efficient, although I
would have preferred the efficiency be applied to getting that
maintenance report to the flight crew.
