The journey is more important than the destination


They’re digging up the runway at SFO. Apparently all the airlines with flights scheduled into San Francisco were warned about this months ago, but maybe they thought it was a bluff and they didn’t change their schedules. Or maybe SFO lied about telling everyone. Whatever the story, Delta in Seattle were talking about how there wasn’t enough room on the runway at San Francisco and so traffic control were holding things up – a good way to shift responsibility.
I’m on the 5:03pm flight. Boarding was delayed to 6:20pm,and then 6:40,and then when everyone was on board the Spectrum ZX81 that controls the plane crashed, and it took so long to turn it back on again that only now, at 8:10pm,more than three hours later, are we taxiing towards the runway.

Let me put that three hour delay in context. The flight to San Francisco from Seattle takes 90 minutes, so I could have flown there and back again. Instead of which we waited and waited, and I kept my lap warm by balancing a volcanically hot Lenovo on top of it, trying to sort out a spreadsheet.

Still, while I was there I had the best food SeaTac has to offer near gate A6.

The only food SeaTac has to offer near gate A6. A maple doughnut, a Danish pastry that was mostly frosting, and a humous sandwich that made me want to die while I was eating it. So no, that wasn’t great. It was a meal as damage control, already anticipating my very very late departure and (hopefully) arrival in San Francisco tonight.

We took off at 8:23pm. With the exception of the time I got snowed in and had to wait an entire day to get on a flight to a different airport, I this is the longest it’s ever taken me to get out of Seattle.

Fortunately, the runway work will be completed by the 27th.

Unfortunately, I am meant to be flying back out of SFO on the 18th.


One response to “The journey is more important than the destination”

  1. Will you get money back? My last two flights had an hour delay each so didn’t qualify, as they were only 1h 40 long this was disproportionately annoying.

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