Having spent the last 17 years in Dallas, most of my travels have been
on AA. The combination of the Wright Amendment and the presence of
AA's corporate headquarters near DFW made them the only game in town,
unless you were willing to deal with the rigamarole of booking two
separate tickets on Southwest, and actually gathering up your bags at
an intermediate airport
As a result, out frequent flyer miles are all with AA so when we put
our Round The World (RTW) itinerary together we went with the OneWorld
Alliance, and used our miles to get business class tickets from Denver
to London Heathrow.
We got to DIA about an hour and a half before scheduled departure and
everything was great until we got on the plane. There's no delicate
way to put this - it smelled like a septic tank (I fell into one once,
I should know).
At first I just assumed one of our fellow passengers was experiencing
a bout of intestinal distress, something I'm all too familiar with.
After an hour of an all-out assault on my olfactory nerve, though, it
was clear something was horribly, horribly wrong.
Thankfully I was able to sleep through most of the flight. Jen wasn't
as lucky and later told me that she held her glass of O.J. up to her
nose in a futile attempt to escape the stench. As we left the plane
we heard the flight attendant complain to the pilot that "the new
chemicals aren't working."
Thinking that we had crossed the required unpleasant flight experience
off of the list for this trip, we had some lunch and went to the
Admiral's club to hang out.
I wouldn't describe the experience there as unpleasant, necessarily -
"Yankee" is the word that comes to mind. No one was outright rude,
but they weren't helpful either.
After several hours in the club we went down to our gate. We saw on
the displays that boarding was delayed by 35 minutes, but decided to
just wait it out.
After getting on the plane, the flight attendants came by to ask what
we wanted for dinner. Except what they really meant is what that we
have left do you want for dinner. Both my first and second choices
were already taken. I tried not to sulk, unsuccessfully, so I was
already in a bad mood when the captain made an announcement that there
was some sort of maintenance problem.
My mood blackened further about an hour and a half later when he made
the announcement that we would need a different aircraft. Confidence
was not restored when he came back on and said that maintenance had
fixed the problem while he was making the prior announcement.
Being the eternal optimist, though, I thought we were finally out of
the woods, and would get to London just a couple of hours later than
expected.
Of course we got out onto the runway, only to have an announcement
made that we needed to go back to the gate, but that it would be at
least 30 minutes before a gate would be open.
3 hours after boarding we got off of the first plane, and were told
our new plane was at gate K19. We needed to go straight to the gate,
neither passing go, nor collecting $200.
I'm typing this 4 hours after boarding the first plane, sitting at the
gate. Since they served neither food nor beverage during the 3 hours
we toured the O'Hare tarmac we grabbed some McDonald's, so I'm
actually feeling much better now.
The latest irritation is the gate agent's insistence that our plane is
at the gate, when you can gaze over her right shoulder and see the
empty jetway.
Hopefully we'll get out of here soon...
Sent from my iPod
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