John's Random Review

I’d heard of TripIt from people at work, but hadn’t used it. We’re going to AZ for Spring Training, and i needed to be able to print out all the itineraries and confirmation numbers and all that, but can’t from work because gmail is blocked. So i was going to just forward all the emails to work, but instead decided to forward them to plans@TripIt.com instead and see how well it worked.

They link everything together, parse it all and put it into a slick itinerary combined with weather, maps, directions and other cool stuff. Its a lot cooler than i expected it to be. And by looking at it all in one place, i realized that i had booked the rental car for the wrong days! (We land at almost midnight, i accidentally put in 11:30pm for the next day!). Seeing it in the wrong place on the list made it trivial to find and correct. I’d had the emails and printouts from the rental car place on my desk for a week and never noticed i had the wrong days! Fixing this kind of thing at the airport at midnight would have been a GIANT nightmare!

Update 3/25/08: TripIt saved us twice this trip, actually. The itinerary printout also had directions from PHX to the Hotel. Our GPS tried to take us to a completely different place (you know something is wrong when it takes 30 seconds to plan a route and it tries to go around 800 miles instead of 31) and then died altogether. It got into this mode where it had a buggy route stored in memory somewhere, then crashed hard. when it restarted we had to go through the full setup again, but it remembered where we wanted to go, so it tried to recalculate the route and crashed again. If we popped out the map card, it went to a full reset, but after putting the map card back in, it would still randomly crash when we used it. I think we need a new map memory card?

Traveling to the midwest can be a pain sometimes. Being from the midwest, we know that, so we planned for it. We’d been checking the weather reports, and were worried because the minneapolis area was due for thunderstorms right around the time we were supposed to arrive, so we split our stuff across our bags and carried one on. That way, even if we got stuck in MSP we’d be able to drive to green bay in time to make the wedding we had to be at on saturday and have our dress clothes. Then while boarding, a flight attendant started coming back up the jetway telling us that there’s no room for bags unless they fit under the seat. And this isn’t planeside check she’s doing, this is full on checking of our bags, we’re not getting them back until our final destination. After all our planning, we were about to be undone at the last minute. But our flight is boarding on time, so we’re not too worried. once we all get seated, the captain comes on and says “Well, folks..”, and at this point i know it isn’t good news, “..it looks like they are having high winds in minneapolis, so we’re looking at right now an hour and a half delay. So we’re going to let everyone back off the plane.” Then the flight attendant starts announcing flights that people are going to miss their connections, “If you’re on flights to amsterdam, blah blah blah, bring all of your baggage, as we’ll be rerouting you. Everyone else, leave your stuff so you can board faster later”. So we all get off the plane.

As soon as we’re all out, they come back on: “Sorry everyone, we have a new departure time, so we need to reboard right now. Nobody will miss their connections, everyone back on!”… so we all reboard. And we push back from the gate, taxi to the runway, then move off to the side. I turn to laura and say “Uh oh, this isn’t good”, as i see other planes passing us and taking off. The captain comes back on “Well, looks like we’ve got a new delay, we’re gonna be here until 4:15.”. We were supposed to leave at 3:21, it was about 10 to 4 at this point already. At 4:15 he told us it would be another 15 minutes, and it was. We made up some time in the air, but still ended up landing about an hour late.

Our flight to Appleton started ominously, with the pilot telling us the seatbelt sign would be on for the whole (40 minute) flight, as it was probably going to be pretty bumpy. I love when they say that, as in most of my experience, that means its going to be smooooooth sailing! And it was. The plane was really quiet (i think it was a canadair rj?), and the ride was nice and smooth. It took us longer to actually get our luggage (all of it, whew!) at ATW than the flight took! The reason? There’s only one guy! Appleton is a small airport, and when you land at 11:30 pm, that guy does all the work. he guides the plane in with the little flashlights, he drives the jetway, he unloads the luggage. and this trip he got a surprise! When he emerged from the back room with the first piece of luggage, the whole area had a collective giggle. He was carrying well wrapped, and well traveled, huge antlers! “Did anyone have some antlers?”, and of course, the one guy wearing camouflage came forward to claim them. Ah, traveling to the midwest never gets old!

What we learned this Christmas vacation about airline travel:

1. Never travel multiple airlines in a single trip (at least in the continental US where you can avoid it)
2. keep everything they give you. boarding passes, luggage info, etc. even if someone tells you that you don’t need it anymore.
3. If someone from one Airline X tells you to “take this to a Airline Y counter”, don’t go anywhere. That person can call the other airline’s counter/desk directly and do it over the phone.
4. The airline that caused you to be late / miss a flight is responsible for helping you. If your Airline X flight was late, causing you to miss a Airline Y flight, Airline Y can’t do anything for you, they didn’t do anything wrong (yet!).
5. Travel protection insurance during the winter for midwest travel is probably worth the $100 extra (or whatever it costs for your trip)

For more details about our xmas travel fiasco, follow the jump. Its a looooooong story.
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It started out so well. A beautiful sunset on the ship canal bridge coming into Seattle. We were on our way to the Monday Night Football game between the Green Bay Packers and the Seattle Seahawks. Oh how decieving a pretty sunset can be! The game was awesome (even as a Packer fan!), but the ride home was….not so good. We were at the game for 4 hours, 5:30-9:30 pm. We were in the car for 3 hours and 36 minutes to get home. And its only 23 miles… For more pics and more story, follow the jump!

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Went to mount st. helens this weekend. Took a buncha pics. Too bad it was cloudy (the norm!), so there were no “spectacular” pics. There were quite a few good ones with sun rays, though. Here’s a panorama, though. this is at 8%, its 8 pics wide. The full image is 10444×1471!

When i get some more time i’ll post up some more, though.