Travel Shenanigans
6:15 AM: wakeup.
7:30 AM: Take BART to San Francisco International Airport - transit time, 1.5 hours. (for the non-Bay Area natives, BART = Bay Area Rapid Transit. As ridden by Will Smith inThe Pursuit of Happyness, aged forward a few decades, and unlike wine, not improved with time.) 10:50 AM: Embark on United flight to Chicago O’Hare Airport - transit time, 4 hours.
5:00 PM: Disembark, hurriedly race to connection to Munich.
6:05 PM: Embark on United flight to Munich International Airport - transit time, 9 hours.
9:50 AM: Disembark, find taxi to residence.
My day in a nutshell, stripped of weekday commuter-packed public transit, sketchy airport WiFi, stale pressurized airplane cabins, and mediocre airline food for your reading pleasure and convenience. I’m sure that most of you have ridden airplanes before, so I’ll summarize the more salient highlights.
Easily the most exciting part of my trip was getting to use the newfangled TSA Pre boarding program. I only began noticing these a few months ago, but today was my lucky day: the all-powerful random number generator chose me for the TSA Pre line. And what a joy it was! The usual 20-30 minutes in a packed line, in which I would be forced to take off my jacket, shoes, and belt (hoping my pants don’t slip off) and put all my items in bins in a panic, done away with. Instead, a leisurely 5 minute journey, where I felt almost guilty for passing so easily. It makes one feel almost warmly towards the TSA, before one remembers the golden days before modern airport security.
The subsequent 4 hour flight to Chicago was uneventful, punctuated only by a delay in boarding my connecting flight to Munich due to the fact that the “seat covers on the airplane were so soiled that we had to take time to replace them” (as quoted by the United Airlines representative). Not really sure what that implies, so I’ll leave that to your imagination. Then the boarding, and the 9 hour flight. Thank goodness for airplane movies.
