A journey not without its surprises.
I’d booked a relatively late flight, working on the theory that it would give as much Wiggle room as possible for getting to the airport; worst case, it’s a nice airport to hang out in, because it’s basically a mall with planes. Even landside is pretty nice.
There was an unexpected amount of traffic on the way to the airport, and the route to avoid it involved some runs through suburban streets, or at least what looked like suburban streets to me. Got there with plenty of time though.
The first leg from Indy to Phoenix was a full one, according to the announcements, to the extent that they wanted people to volunteer for gate checking of carry-on luggage. There were a lot of wheelchair users, so there were a bunch of wheelchair controllers & so on in the overhead lockers, which is maybe what they were worried about?
What I was worried about is that the flight left more than 20 minutes late, and I was concerned that I wouldn’t have enough time to get to my next flight. Or that they wouldn’t have enough time to get my luggage onto my next flight.
As it turns out, neither of those was really an issue.
The flight from Phoenix to LA left around an hour later than scheduled; I have no idea why. Still, it gave me plenty of time to relax between flights.
The system for the hotel shuttle was that you call the hotel front desk from the designated shuttle pickup spot outside the terminal, and they tell the driver that there’s a pickup. I don’t know whether that means they’ll ignore you if you try to flag them down, or if it’s just more of a case of making sure that the driver knows to stop. In any case, my first attempt to phone them got a you have no network notification, and the next one got a phone that wasn’t being answered.
Attempt number 3 got through, and the shuttle turned up fairly soon afterwards. From watching the situation at the hotel the next day, they seem to run on an “every half hour” basis.
Got to the hotel lobby at midnight, by which point I was very focused on going to sleep.
I slept well, I think. The reservation came with free breakfast, which turned out to be pretty good, especially because they had a mini waffle maker.
Hotel checkout was by 1200, but my flight was at a thoroughly obnoxious 2355, so I had some time to kill. Rather than do that at the airport, because I had 8 hours airside at LAX last year & have no desire to repeat the experience, I hung out in the hotel lobby instead; Stashed my bags with the office, took a few walks around El Segundo, and generally had a relaxing day.
The airport shuttle got me to my terminal maybe a half-hour before check-in opened, which I think is good timing. Plus, I got to see a baffling typo on one of the other hotel shuttles;
