It seemed like an easy enough task when I planned it yesterday. Fly from Seattle to San Francisco before breakfast. Spend the day in San Francisco meeting with a client. Slip across the bay to Oakland in the late afternoon. Fly from Oakland back to Seattle and be home just in time for reading the scriptures and family prayer. A perfect plan for an experienced traveler familiar with the Bay Area. Sure, it would have been easier to fly down last night, but that would have meant less time with Thelma. Besides, Braeden and I had finally managed to get a home teaching appointment with a new couple in our ward and we didn’t want to miss the opportunity.
Simple? Yes. Doable? Of course. Doomed to failure and misery? Apparently.
I should have seen it coming when my alarm went off at 4:15 this morning. Nothing good happens before 6 AM. Nothing enjoyable happens before 7:30. Case in point: at 6 AM I was staring longingly out the window next to Gate N16 as my flight to San Francisco backed away from the terminal. It wasn’t my fault! How could this be happening? I’m not easily rebuffed. For a moment I contemplated bursting through the security door, running onto the tarmac, climbing up the landing gear in to baggage cabin and breaking my way through that special spot in the floor just inside the rear galley. I saw it on a movie once, I think. I was pretty sure I could pull it off.
But, I’m wearing a new shirt today and I want to go at least 24 hours without getting it dirty with ketchup or hydraulic fluid or some such. So, instead, I decided to sulk in the United lounge and drown my sorrow in a complimentary Diet Coke. I should have seen it coming. When it’s too early for breakfast but you’ve already downed a Diet Coke, you’re in for a bad day.
I stirred my drink and released my aggression by repeatedly bashing a defenseless piece of ice with a plastic straw. Who to blame?
Maybe I should blame the United kiosk that wouldn’t print my boarding pass in the ticketing hall. Maybe I should blame the gaggle of agents that wouldn’t help me. (I’m in the First Class line! I’m looking executive! Doesn’t that merit some attention? Sure, I didn’t have a First Class ticket, but they didn’t know that.)
By the time someone came to look at the machine and the problem was sorted out, I was denied boarding because it was too close to take off. The kiosk wouldn’t print the boarding pass even though I was already checked into the flight. I was ticked off. I tried to reason with the agent that I had already checked in, I just needed the pass. I knew I had a copy on my laptop. Maybe she could give me access to a printer and I could print my own. No luck. “It” wouldn’t let her print me a copy, whatever “it” was. I hate it. It gives me nothing but trouble.
The agent told me that I would have to get on standby for the next flight but then left without telling me how to do that. I finally found someone else who could help me and printed a standby pass for me. They told me that if I hurried to my original flight with the standby ticket, I might still be able to get on. Unfortunately, I got backed up behind TSA Agent Mr. Friendly who took forever to verify the identity of each person as he mockingly acted as though he had some special gift that required great strain and concentration to match the face of the person standing in front of him to the picture on their ID. Give me a break! How hard is this!
By the time I got to the gate... Well, you know that part of the story already. Lounge. Diet Coke. Suppressed rage. Is it really only 6:30?
About 30 minutes before the departure time for the next flight I made my way to the gate to thankfully discover that I had a spot. I had even been upgraded to an “economy plus” seat on the aisle thanks to my frequent flyer status on a partner airline. That meant I had enough leg room to lower the tray in front of me and get some work done while en route. Things were looking up. The flight was smooth. We landed a little early. I made it easily out of the terminal to the airport BART station. I existed the BART at the Montgomery Street Station and was greeted by the cool, misty ocean air that makes me love San Francisco so much.
Sure, I arrived at my destination an hour late, but everyone else was running late as well and was thankful for the excuse. There were French pastries for breakfast. (I had the pain au chocolat.) The morning meetings went well. We had lunch later at a small French restaurant, Café Claude, in a decorative back alley. (I had the the onion soup with a perfect Gruyère cheese crust as a starter, the pork tenderloin sandwich for my main course and Tarte Tatin, up upside-down carmel apple tart, for desert.) 
As I walked back to the office bathed in the warm summer sun, I marveled once again at the miracle of modern travel that allows me to have a horrible, cranky morning in Seattle and a splendid afternoon in San Francisco.I should have known it would be too good to last.
I left the office in plenty of time to make my early evening flight out of Oakland. I could have taken a later flight out of San Francisco, but I wanted to get home as early as possible to spend time with my family, so I opted for an earlier flight out of Oakland on Alaska Airlines. I opted wrong. The BART should have taken 20 minutes from the Montgomery Street Station to the Coliseum/Oakland Airport Station. It took 40 minutes. The AirBART bus transfer to the airport should have taken another 15-25 minutes. It took 45 minutes. I should have been on the 6:05 flight out of Oakland. It took off without me.
I finally got off the bus and rushed to the Alaska ticket counter to find the place nearly empty. That’s never a good sign. My flight was long gone. There were no more flights to Seattle out of the airport that night. I could either wait until the next day or try to make it to San Jose in hopes of getting on the standby list for a 7:50 flight to Seattle that still had a few open seats. I rushed out of the airport, found a shuttle bus that could take me directly to the San Jose airport for a hefty price and trusted my person to a newly immigrated driver, a GPS device and the California highway system. I got to the airport just in time to get one of the two remaining seats and drown my sorrows in a pair or Whopper Juniors from Burger King. So much for the fine dining of earlier in the day. Sure, I had the French fries, but it wasn’t the same.
It was about 10 o’clock when I called Thelma and told her that I was finally in Seattle, I was almost to my car, traffic shouldn’t be bad that time of night and I would be home in about 35 minutes. True, false, false and false. The fatigue must have been setting in, because I staggered around the parking garage for about 15 minutes trying to remember where I parked my car. I found it, eventually, but also found my way into one traffic jam after another on the way home as various sections of freeway were closed down for evening maintenance. At 11:15 or so I finally pulled into the my driveway.
I stumbled into the house and into Thelma’s open arms. For a moment, the world was right again. Then I remembered: I’m driving to Boise in the morning and I haven’t packed.
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