On the Road

This On The Road column is a travel adventure, actually a mad rush across the country. We are fortunate in Lake Harmony to be near to two good small airports with commercial flight connections to nearly everywhere. For our flight to Sacramento, California, we chose to fly American from Allentown, which is under an hour’s drive from here.

I needed to be by my dad who had a heart attack and was dying in the hospital in Marysville. We booked a rental to drive from the airport an hour north to the hospital, and a hotel in nearby Yuba City.

Buying air tickets was a pain. One internet site promising the best air fares tacked on enough fees to eliminate savings.

One cheaper trip was 27 and a half hours in total flight and connection time, so American it was via Charlotte. We packed our computer cases with travel items and brought a small carry case with clothing changes that could be loaded in an overhead bin – so no checkin baggage, and on Thursday morning we were off.

In Allentown, I found a parking place in the main lot close to the terminal, then walked in and right up to the TSA line. After some fussing over the braces I wear on my knees, we were through to await our American Eagle flight.

Charlotte is an amazing airport. It sprawls. The small commuter airplane gates are on one end. The distance between

by Seth Isenberg

our gate to where the west coast flight, a 777, was parked was about a mile. This was tough on my poor braced knees and cancerafflicted body; I arrived exhausted. I’d be needing a wheelchair going forward.

I hobbled up to the gate to find a tremendous herd of passengers gathered as boarding time was near. But we heard this: “Passengers on the Los Angeles flight, boarding will be delayed because the flight attendants have not arrived on their flight into Charlotte.” Over the next hour we got a play-by-play as their flight landed and emptied of passengers. Finally, there was a parade of flight attendants. This crew barely had time to grab a coffee before they were put back to work again.

American stuffs near 300 people in their 777s I was told, so loading is complicated. When it was our turn, we found that we were stuck in the back, in the middle seats of a four-person middle section – three seats by each window, then four in the middle –two aisles. The seats were narrow and so close that my knees were right up against the seat in front of me. A couple of hours in, I had to get up to walk in the aisle, do some exercises and use the tiny lav.

See On the Road, page 12