The trip to Dallas was uneventful, and although it was weird travelling without Lisa, I managed to get through it without disaster. No chance to do any writing, I was in an aisle seat and the two crazy people next to me had to keep getting up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was a bit of a worry at the Dallas\/Fort Worth terminal, as I couldn’t find the Avis desk to pick up the rental car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After I while I figured out that I needed to catch a shuttle to the rental car depot. The airport is big, with 4 terminals connected by mini-trams. The shuttle drove for about 10 minutes before it arrived at the depot. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
No problem signing for the car – a Daewoo Leganza (abreviated on the keychain fob as DWOOLEGZ) – and full of confidence I checked the Avis map and the Yahoo directions I’d printed out, and drove out of the car park.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
15 minutes later I was hopelessly lost, travelling south on a freeway to nowhere. I knew the hotel was north of the airport, but for the life of me I couldn’t find the right roads and intersections. Eventually I gave up on following the Yahoo instructions and looked at the Avis map, and found an alternate route. I must have misjudged the scale of the map, or something, because I always seemed to have travelled further on the map than I had thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Finally got to the hotel, checked in, and then had a rest before checking out Eric’s itinerary to see what time I was supposed to pick him up from the airport, as he was arriving several hours after me and from a different city. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I drove off to the airport, and upon entering the loop road that circles the 4 terminals, I realised that I was missing several peices of information: What Airline was Eric flying? I guessed at SouthWest (for some reason, probably “stupidity”) and drove around looking for a sign that said which terminal serviced SouthWest. Turns out none of them. American flies to Terminals A, B, and C; Delta is Terminal D, and all others seem to get in at Terminal B. I eventually park at terminal B and run in to look for information. Nothing. Eventually I ask at the National Airlines counter a) because they’re not busy, and b) because I flew on their airline this morning so technically I am a customer deserving of assistence. I ask the woman behind the counter, “I have friend I’m supposed to be meeting, I think on Southwest, where to I meet him?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Southwest doesn’t fly to this airport. They use Left Field(?!?!)”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oh, that would be real good. His flight is due in 15 minutes and it would be typical if he told me the wrong airport. I just assumed he would be flying in to the same airport as me. I asked if she could confirm that Southwest was in fact the right airline? I gave her the flight number and the source city, and a few minutes later (seemed like half an hour!) she came back and said, “Southwest do not have a flight of that number, that’s all I can tell you. You can go through the checkpoint and check the monitors to see which airline has that flight number?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I decide to do this, but quickly realise that with 4 terminals to check, and each gate cluster with its own exclusive list of arrivals, it was a hopeless task.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Poor Eric! I’d promised to meet him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I dashed back through the checkpoint to the car, feeling like four different kinds of idiot, and drove back to the hotel as fast as was legal (+\/- 10%). (I can now confirm that if you take the correct route, the hotel is 10 minutes away from the airport.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I get into my room, and this time get out my notes and check the airline. It’s American! Problem still not solved, I have 5 minutes until his plane lands, and I still don’t know if it is Terminal A, B, or C – American docks at all of the them! (I guess DFW is American’s hub.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I get out the yellow pages and look for a flight information number for American. I find one. It’s in Spanish! I look for another number, call it, and find out the terminal, gate, and estimated arrival time for Eric’s flight. Halleluia, they’re running 15 minutes late.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Back in the car, zoom off back to the airport, park at Terminal C, run into the terminal. I appear to be at Gate C5. Eric is supposed to get in at C39, all the way at the other end of the terminal!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I walk fast, and eventually meet Eric walking the other way, looking for me. It turns out that they were stuck on the tarmac for 30 minutes because a faulty plane was docked at their gate, and he hadn’t been waiting long, but he did think to call Lisa on his cellphone to see if she knew where I was. This of course would make Lisa worry on my behalf, so he called her back and said it was ok, I’d turned up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That evening we ate at a TexMex restaurant called “On the Border”, and I ordered a Margarita because I needed to mellow out after that traumatic day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The trip to Dallas was uneventful, and although it was weird travelling without Lisa, I managed to get through it without disaster. No chance to do any writing, I was in an aisle seat and the two crazy people next to me had to keep getting up. There was a bit of a worry at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diary","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}