Holiday Travel Is No Holiday

Okay...

For the record, this whole travelling thing on the "Holiday on the 25th" is always trouble. But also, for the record, I disclose that- like a lot of you- there's juggling of families and the idea of trying to make sure you see everyone that time of year.

TBH is big on the Holiday.

If she could make sure that her tree was up November 26th without any kind of Holiday repercussion, she'd pull it off. She transforms her house into a holiday observance zone. All the paintings, posters, and nick-knacks that are in the place 11 months out of the year are summarily re-placed for that month of time.

She makes sure that she's off for the last two weeks of the year so she can go home and spend time with her family in Alabama and go to any possible bowl game that WDE is involved.

I will give her credit, though. The meal on the holiday is atypical.
Normally, my version of the meal would be pizza, something-Italian, or Waffle House. Her family's is steak-based...

Completely dig it...

But getting from my dad's place in Long Beach, California to hers in Alabama required a mechanical engineering degree.

There are departures, arrivals, multiple cities, multiple airports, the calendar and its quirks, air travel and its quirks all involved in making this happen.

So after taking out my travel slide rule, we figured that surprising my dad before the Holiday and travelling back on the Holiday would be the best choice financially...

Sounded good on paper... but they never travel on paper...

Holiday Morning meant a 3:30-local AM time wake up for a 4AM leaving from my dad's house. It took me 15 minutes to get from his place to LAX- which was astronomical by travel standards. There were 8 cars with me on the 405...

Unheard of...

Then, I get to LAX... after dropping off the rental car...
((That's the picture on the right, thanks to me))

The place was packed. It took 90 minutes to get from curbside check-in ((I had already gotten my boarding pass the night before)), through the government check point, and onto the plane... boarding just in time...

My reservation corresponded with a letter that would have given me my normal window seat on a smaller plane. Unfortunately, they switched plane sizes. That meant I now was the proud owner of a middle seat- for a 3-and-a-half hour plane ride.

Pleasant...

Then, it was a two-hour layover in Atlanta before boarding a cigar tube and a flight to Montgomery. The good thing about the flight itself was it would arrive two minutes before I took off...

The bad thing about the flight was:
A) I had the female version of Chico Esquela for an attendant- didn't understand a word she said...
B) I had a woman sitting next to me across the aisle who really needed to purchase two seats and would have created an issue had the flight itself been full. She also, as far as I could tell, used her cell phone to send text messages on the plane.
C) I had a married couple with an under aged, unticketed child- which is fine. Someone associated with the ocean named-multiregional flyer told the couple that the child had to sit at the window seat since that was where the mask was in emergency situations.

Instead of swapping the child from the father's lap to the mother's lap and everything being fine, the family shifted seats entirely- to behind me.

The kid was a kicker... for the entire 42 minute flight.
Had that going for me...

I'm still trying to grasp the idea of why everyone thinks talking to me will make a flight go faster... that's why we have televisions now. And, no, sitting in a middle seat doesn't mean I'm a dual back support for the two guys sitting to either side of me who want to twist to get comfortable.

So, for all of you... flying on a holiday doesn't mean that everyone else is at their destination and you're the only one on the flight.

Expect the worst and work backwards...
And the airports haven't quite gotten around to making sure that all ad campaigns are accurate, have they...???

Someone needs to tell the folks at Hartsfield about this, I think...