weekend travel notes

Trip of the month: three days in (really hot, really humid) Houston for a 60th birthday party.

For short trips, I've become a regular user of FastTrack's long-term airport parking, since it seems kind of sucky to be asking my friends to drive me to/from the airport all the time. Plus, it gives me more flexibility; last Thursday, I was able to have dinner in Palo Alto with a friend visiting from Seattle, before heading to SFO to catch the red-eye.

I was just mentioning to someone a couple of weeks ago how I hadn't had a problem in several years, while travelling domestically with my small Swiss Army knife. Of course, once I'd said that, I mentally kicked myself, knowing that I'd just jinxed myself. Sure enough, security found the knife this time through, and gave me three options: check a second bag and pay the $25 fee, mail the knife home and pay $10 for shipping, or throw the knife away. I chose option four: hide the knife in the women's bathroom outside of security and hope that it stays there. I'd done something similar once at the SF passport agency, but I'd never tried it overnight before. Amazingly, the knife was still there when I returned, three and a half days later. I'm not sure what that says about airport security, but I'm happy to still have my decrepit old Swiss army knife, that my parents bought me in Switzerland over twelve years ago.

On the return trip, due to poor planning and some traffic (and wanting to stop for a Whataburger breakfast taquito), we arrived at the bag drop counter about 23 minutes before the flight was scheduled to depart, and the airline agent refused to let us check in our bags, due to the "30-minute cutoff" rule. She tried to insist that we fly on a later flight (I suspect the flight was overbooked and she wanted to clear up some space), but that was pretty much not an option for us, so we tried a few different approaches.

First we asked if we could check our bags on later flight and pick them up at SFO later. We were told "passengers must fly with their bags". I know for a fact that sometimes passengers don't fly with their bags; when the airline screws up, or when a flight is delayed and the passenger is able to catch his/her connection but the bag doesn't make it. But, I guess it's a good rule from the security perspective.

Next we asked if we could leave a bag at the counter, and have a friend pick it up later, since we didn't really need it. We were told that the airline didn't have the resources and couldn't handle this task.

Finally, we asked, if we packed all our stuff into our (half-empty) carry-on bags, if she would throw the remaining suitcase away for us. At this point she realized that we were not about to give up our seats on the flight, so she suggested that since the suitcase was only a few inches larger than carry-on size, we could try to get it through security and then have it checked doorside.

We ended up going one better; we got through security with no problems, and then, even though the flight was full and carry-on space was tight, one of the flight attendants actually managed to fit our suitcase into an overhead bin, so we never had to check it at all. Ironically, the flight's departure was delayed 15-20 minutes anyway, but I'm not complaining this time.