Where We Mostly Sat At Airports Or On Airplanes For 22 Hours

As is tradition, the first day of the current tradition is endless travel. To add to the fun this time, Alaska Air experienced a major IT network outage on July 20, grounding all of their planes for 3 hours.

And it probably would have made sense to check to see the status of our first flight on July 21, but we didn’t. So we got up at 4:30 a.m. to arrive at the airport by 7:45 a.m. for our 9:00 a.m. flight, to find out that our 9:00 a.m. flight was now 11:30.

Which turned out to be 12:15 p.m. The flight itself was a bit bumpy from all the storms in the atmosphere covering the eastern half of the US. It smoothed out a bit once we were over the western US. The pilot did their best to make up some of the time – the flight was 5 hours instead of 6 hours.

Fortunately, I had booked the two flights with an intentional 5 1/2 hour layover, so the 3 hour delay had no impact on our connecting flight at SeaTAC. When we walked off the plane, the Alaska Air app said our gate was D3. We had deplaned at gate N13. So we found our way to D3 – left-right-right-left-take a train-left-right-left – where we sat for a bit until we noticed the change to the departure time and the gate: now the flight was delayed an hour and the gate was N14, literally right where we had been when we landed!

So back we went. The N gates were a complete zoo. Nary an empty seat to be found and extremely noisy. We could not hear the announcements from the gate. Which is how we missed the start boarding announcement.

The second flight was a bit smoother than the first and we landed shortly after 10:00 p.m. Alaska Time.

An airport employee called our hotel to bring its shuttle to pick us up – something that the hotel’s website nor the cruise line mentioned.

We had booked a room for one night in this hotel, because it’s the same one where the land/cruise adventure will begin. This was the view from our window:

In the morning (July 22), we checked out of the room and checked back in to the room assigned to us with the group. We have zero instructions as to what we’re supposed to do to find the group. Fortunately, the front desk staff was a little familiar with this drill. They suggested checking the common area around 3:00 p.m., which apparently is the typical time they are there.

The rest of today is a blank. Soon we’ll go to lunch and maybe we’ll check out the stores across the street.

Tomorrow: The Adventure Begins {whatever that means}