Actually, let’s talk about the day before Day 1, in which Delta Delivers. Again. Yes, another Delta snafu. Twenty-four hours prior to our flight I went online to check us in and Delta’s website told me that it couldn’t do it. Something about “not having an eTicket”. The only thing the website suggested is that we call Delta. Awesome. So, like an idiot I did.
Their automated phone system starts with the news – delivered optimistically – that “call waits times are averaging under two (that’s right: TWO) hours.” Shit. So, having no brains I hang on. After an hour, I have to leave because I’m scheduled to meet two old HS buddies for lunch in Menlo Park, so I park the handset next to Eileen and she’s on duty. After I leave she waits another 90 minutes before an agent FINALLY answers.
The agent’s helpful response? I can’t help with that – they’ll have to take care of it at the airport. Literally, the only thing that the agent can do is (repeatedly) tell E that “your reservations match your itinerary”, a phrase that is as obtuse and it is unhelpful. Can’t explain what is wrong, can’t explain how it will be solved…can barely validate that the problem IS solvable E texts me that this is 2.5 hours of life we’ll never get back. Sigh.
So, anyway, back to Day 1. We finish prepping the house – including telling our NEW Nest thermostat that we’re going to be “Away” and hit the road for some donuts. (It’s the law.) We drop our car off with AM Parking, a new-to-us offsite place just down the street from Lyric’s old warehouse on Martin Ave. The shuttle arrives just as we reach the waiting spot so we’re at the airport in no time. Simple.
Because we expected at least some challenges with check-in we’d given ourselves about 15 minutes more at the airport than our original plan. When we reached the ticketing agent she punched in some numbers and had our boarding passes printed up in about 60 seconds, however. She said that what apparently happened is that their ticketing system managed to get confused by the combination of date change and cabin class change that was a result of our rescheduling. But clearly this kind of confusion is something that they deal with at the airport constantly. I think the take-away is never again to stress about an automated check-in issue. Just let them sort it out at the airport.
Of course, us being us meant that we were – as usual – at the airport two hours before our flight left so we would have to cool our heels in the terminal. We breezed (almost) through Security. We had Pre-TSA and no line to get our IDs checked, although they ended up hand searching our backpack which, admittedly, looked like a tangle of wire and explosives under X-ray. They even checked E’s bag of trail mix for explosives! Having satisfied themselves that we weren’t terrorists, we were passed through and took up residence at our gate until boarding.
The flight itself was good. The seats had the advertised leg room and were fine. Snacks were small (3-4 oz) cans of juice or soda from a reduced menu. For example, they weren’t stocking my usual standby of apple juice. We also had a choice of pretzels or biscotti. The weather over Seattle was a combo of light overcast and smoke from fires in BC.
Upon landing we made our way downstairs and over to the Rental Car Shuttle area where we were surprised to find a very long line snaking up and down the sidewalk waiting for the buses to arrive. Also nearby was a gang of firefighters, here to assist in fighting the raging wildfires. They were waiting for their pickup to arrive. Buses were arriving every 5 minutes or so, and it took us about 20 minutes of waiting before we finally reached the front of the line and got taken to the Rental Car Facility. At the RCF there was, of course, another long line of folks at the Budget counter. However, we took a chance and went downstairs to the FastBreak counter. I’d never done this before, and I hadn’t specifically checked off the boxes when I did the online rental saying I wanted FastBreak service so I wasn’t sure if this would work. I approached the guy at the FastBreak counter and he punched in some stuff and then said “did you look over there <pointing to a board just to my right>?” “Over there” were a series of rental folders with different names on them….including ours! So we DID have a FastBreak reservation, and our car was gassed up and ready to go! SWEET! This probably saved us 30 minutes of standing in line.
Our car was a new Ford Fusion. Took a few minutes to figure out where all the controls were and get Andrew’s phone synced to it so he could stream Spotify for our trip since my phone was being used for Waze, but we were soon on our way out of the airport and heading toward Bellingham. Traffic was really bad – just an endless series of traffic jams for close to 2/3 of the trip. What should have been about a 2 hour trip took just over 2.5 hours (including a very short detour off the freeway to grab some Burger King about 2:15P) and we finally pulled into Robert’s apartment around 4PM. After meeting Ashley and spending about 15 minutes at the apartment, we left Andrew there while E and I went over and checked into the Holiday Inn Express and got settled.
We returned to pick everyone up for dinner and went downtown to D’Anna’s Italian (or something like that). This had been on my short-list of interesting looking restaurants and Ashley mentioned it was her favorite place downtown, so seemed like a good choice. Found street parked just across from the front door and got seated on their very nice and new outdoor patio by one of the many seriously-tattooed staff members. Body art is apparently a requirement to work there. Dinner was quite good. We passed around calamari and home ravioli sampler appetizers before settling into extremely generous dinner portions. We dropped the kids back at their apartment with a ton of leftovers and then went back to the hotel to relax.
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