UA/LH MEL-SYD-SFO-FRA-MAN-MUC-SFO-SEA and later home
Here, I embark upon my Xmas/New Year trip to the cold hemisphere, doing MEL-SYD-SFO-FRA-MAN-MUC-SFO-SEA with no stopovers. (... though 23 hours in MAN is close.)
Things started out quite unusually, with me being ready when the cab arrived. The oddities continued when I checked in and heard someone being offered the possibility of a bump in SYD. I enquired, but the bump ($800 in travel vouchers, overnight in SYD) was only for those in Y!
I decided to see whether the SQ lounge was open and it was not. However, there was a sign on the desk saying "wireless internet access", so I went around to the UA lounge and used the SQ wireless. Excellent that there's now an alternative to the appallingly expensive Optus and Telstra systems. I checked my email and found a lengthy but totally useless response from Telstra about a billing mistake they made on my home phone line. They definitely don't deserve any more money from me.
As usual, very few people on board. About 5 of us upstairs. The snack plate appeared to be stale, but I didn't care. I'd brought chips. HTs were good. I was surprised that we bothered to go up to 39,000' for such a short trip, but it made it a shorter trip. At 52 mins, the shortest MEL-SYD I've ever done.
The early arrival gave me time to go to the NZ lounge. While they have sheets sitting in the business centre about how to be ripped off by Telstra and Optus for wireless, there is free wireless with 2 APs very nearby. I guess it must be theirs or SQ's: One called FirstClass and one Business.
Anyone for musical chairs? Someone from Y got an op-up to 16G (lucky girl!!). The UGS in 15B got upgraded to 5J. Someone else replaced him. In a painful irony, the 2 best seats in C, 17A and 16A, are both occupied by little kids who can't make any use of the extra leg room anyhow!
Dinner started well with hot bread rolls and garlic bread, but the main was cold. Even heated up, the broccoli was so underdone it was impossible to cut (... with the plastic knife), so I left it. Dessert was fine.
Movies are all either crap or I've seen them before. The printed movie guide has one of the Dec movies wrong, but ual.com has it right: Kindergarten Cop is on; How the Grinch Stole Christmas is not.
I was up having a chat to an FA when the seatbelt sign came on, but no comment was made, so I went and brushed my teeth. The pilot was obviously a very cautious one, since he regularly had the seatbelt light on when there was no turbulence at all.
Sadly, while the temperature was quite pleasant early in the flight, the heat went up a couple of hours in. It got up to about 27oC, which is way above a level at which I can even hope to sleep. It's lucky I packed a change of clothes for SFO. While discussing this with one FA, slow-metabolism-guy in 18G felt the need to point out that he was quite comfortable. I hope the next person sweltering next to him for 12 hours doesn't use deodorant. (We did later discover we had something in common: having used up our QF points and given up on flying them internationally.) I went downstairs for a while and it was nice and cool, so I wandered around there for a while.
On the ground in SFO, everything was quick, even the appearance of baggage. The really long shower in the UA Arrivals lounge was wonderful.
(There's some sort of free wireless accessible from the Int'l RCC in SFO, hence this post.)
Very hot towels were followed by a nice salad and drinks, plus much turbulence to encourage rapid drinking of such drinks. I watched The Island, which was quite a good movie. Roast turkey, stuffing, mashed sweet potato and veggies was quite delicious, while the cheesecake was pleasant, but a bit bland.
Despite this being the old style C seats (but with Flynet wireless installed on board), I was rather tired, so managed about 6 hours sleep, though waking briefly due to various numb body parts at times and eventually being awoken for breakfast. The omelette looked very ordinary, but, fortunately, was better than it looked.
On arrival, I visited the Senator lounge and read The Age on one of the computers while waiting for a shower. There are not nearly enough seats in the lounge, and allowing smoking near the food is just disgusting.
Soon, it was time to go to the "gate", really just a door to the outside world to catch a bus to the stairs of the plane. How primitive.
Speaking of primitive, the LH A320 still has ashtrays in the armrests, but no audio or video. What did they do, use secondhand bits out of a 727 for the interior? Breakfast was good: A variety of cheeses, cold meats, veggies, etc, with a variety of hot bread rolls, fruit in a chocolate cup and chocolates.
Service was very good and very friendly, but they had extra reason to. Near the end of the flight, survey forms were given out. They asked all the usual questions from why we're flying (including asking whether FF points were important to the decision) to rating LH. In the text box for what LH should improve, I wrote, in all caps: "credit full miles on all fares!"
Went through customs easily, despite answering the why I was visiting question with "for the frequent flyer miles". The Hilton's shuttle bus took about 15 mins to turn up. Once I took the 1-min trip, I realised I could have simply walked there in less time than the shuttle took to turn up. Checkin was quick and easy. Got my upgraded room and free breakfast, as I'm still Gold in Hilton's system, despite having received the "we're taking gold away from you" mail! A notice said the leisure club was closing at 2:30pm, so I went immediately to the pool for a swim.
Conveniently, there's a Bewley's Hotel across the road which has free wireless net access.
At checkin, I was told that there is now a new 23kg limit on bags to the USA, but that they wouldn't enforce it on me. How magnanimous! I informed her that there was no notification of this change to Australian passengers, so I didn't see how they could possibly enforce this anyhow.
LH never fails to be silly. Just like last time I flew out of Europe, my seat assignments were changed for no reason. This time, I'm in 4F for MAN-MUC rather than 3F. It doesn't matter at all, I just don't understand why it happens and why they never know why it happens.
Next, she wanted my address in the USA and it took some time for her to work out what to do, since I'm flying on to SEA on a separate UA e-ticket. All that sorted out, I was directed to the Servisair GlobeGround lounge, which had a decent selection of drinks and lots of salty nibbles, such as peanuts and Doritos. Probably a poor choice for a long trip, but I couldn't resist having some. The lounge had notices up saying that smoking was banned as of Aug 1, 2005. Astounding to me, since such bans must have gone into place, what, 20 years ago in Australia??
Late departure due to late arriving plane. Brunch was quite similar to yesterday's, but with less selection of bread rolls. The fruit tart wasn't nearly as good, having an exterior which, though it looked like a nice crispy tart, was actually composed of some soggy, bready substance, far inferior to yesterday's chocolate version.
LH458 is currently in flight, so this will be continued....
At MUC, my connection was reasonably tight, but everything went smoothly. Immediately outside the special(ly pointless) security checkpoint for US flights, a woman was giving out pairs of 30 min free Connexion cards. I didn't think I'd need them, but accepted them.
My seatmate arrived rather late, after coming in on a flight running late from Paris and being whisked over in a shuttle bus to make the flight.
This time we had the new business class, with Flynet and lots of video-on-demand channels. Selection was good and I ended up watching Batman Begins, Wedding Crashers and xXx2, the last of those because I was really getting tired at the end of the flight and didn't want to have to think. While the ability to lie flat and configure the seat is great, there's a lot I don't like about the seats too: They are very firm and they don't breathe, so I find my back gets uncomfortably hot against them.
We received piping hot towels before dinner. As has been my experience generally with LH, the savoury courses of dinner were good, while dessert sucked. It was odd that they had only brown bread, but I was able to obtain a white roll from 1st class. The veal and the goose were tasty, but the carrot cake was dry and unappealing.
A few days ago, I'd registered for a code for free Flynet use (thanks to this post) but, when I tried it, the system said it had expired. So, later in the flight, I tried one of the 30 min cards from MUC. To my surprise, it lasted for at least 1.5 hours!
The strangest thing was that, about 8 hours into the flight, when the cabin was totally dark and everyone was either sleeping or watching movies, they simply turned on all the lights, brought chocolate cakes and drinks around, and then turned all the lights off again. Many people simply had their sleep disturbed for no good reason. The chocolate cake was, at least, a vast improvement on the carrot cake.
An hour or so before landing, they brought around the extremely piping hot towels. The earlier hot towels were among the hottest I've experienced on a plane, but these were the "juggle them from hand to hand for a while until you can hold a corner safely, then wave them around a bit before you can safely touch them to your face" variety. The hot pasta snack was great.
In SFO, I got my passport stamped, picked up my bags, and was directed to the guys who look in bags. Three of them. They decided to look in both my carry-on bags and the larger of my checked bags, while not bothering at all the the smaller one. This was an interesting choice, as the smaller bag was mostly full of pillows. I wonder what they'd have thought of that? They went through everything in a pointless fashion, moving things about and not repacking them properly. They went through every section of the wallet they found, but never searched anything on my person ... such as my main wallet. Two of them left, while the other investigated my laptop.
By investigate, I mean that he powered it up, turned it towards himself and proceeded to browse through the directories. I leaned forward so that I could see what he was doing. He said "you could lean back a bit", to which I replied "yes, I could, but I want to see what you're doing to my machine". This was not a well-received response. After some minutes of browsing, he'd finished. He never looked at anything in the Linux partitions, of course. I was wishing I'd made Linux the default boot OS, as I'm sure that would have confused the hell out of him. I really wanted to tell him where to find both the MP3 and the video of American Idiot (yes, they are on my laptop) but decided against it.
Once he was finished, I asked what he was looking for, and he replied there were many possibilities, including "illegal company records, pornography". Now, given the search he was doing, there's no way he'd have known any company records, or even been able to tell if I had any. As for pornography, I wasn't aware of that being illegal in the USA. It seems to be available everywhere, including on public access TV in Seattle and on most computers.
Having escaped the US terrorists (scary and inept at the same time, just like most of the middle eastern variety), I had to check my bags in, since the bag transfer area outside international was closed. (... not that they bother to put up a sign or anything. There was simply nobody there.)
While first was full, the rest of the plane was about 30% occupied, a testament to the overpriced tickets on this route. Nothing interesting or unusual to report, and baggage handling was extremely tardy at Seatac and with no regard to priority tagging, just as usual.
Only 37 passengers were on this flight, almost 1/3 of them in 1st. The whole of the rest of row 7 was empty, until a dead-heading FA took 7A. The pilot put the Seahawks game on Channel 9 for those who wanted to listen. I was tired, so I took advantage of my 3 seats to sleep most of the way.
I tried the shuttle bus over to international. In the past, I've often wanted the walk or there have been lots of people waiting there, or nobody there at all, so I'd not tried it. It was amazing to see that there is only a massive set of concrete stairs down, yet a wheelchair-accessible bus and an accessible entrance to the international terminal.
Once inside, I went to the RCC and had a drink while using SQ's wireless net connection. Oddly enough, it was blocking plain web access, but nothing else. Email, IM, https, ssh all worked fine, but plain web sites did not. Once SQ's lounge was open, I went down there for a nibble, a shower, and to see how their computers were going. They've increased their food offerings, including some warm meat balls and such now. The shower was fine.
The computers, however, had the same problem as their wireless ... of course, this is much worse, since most of what people do on those is browse the web! The attendant, who was busy putting misspelt notices on the business centre about the lack of internet service, suggested that wireless was working. I informed him of his spelling error and that wireless had exactly the same problem. He was one of those "net = web" folks, so it took quite some time to get him to realise that just because some bloke in the lounge had downloaded his email and the computers couldn't display any web sites didn't validate his conclusion about what was "working" and what was "not working".
Same old same old. Overly cold cabin up until takeoff, then FAs react by turning it into a ....ing sauna. No second serve of nuts; no white rolls or garlic bread. Thankfully, the salad, the chicken and the apple crumble were all pretty good.
Tim Burton's Corpse Bride was the only film that I'd both not seen before and would want to see, but one decent movie is better than nothing. Read some email and some magazines and had a pretty good sleep. Breakfast was below the usual standard: croissants almost cold, omelette with very unappealing hard-ish consistency. There was much better food to be found in the NZ lounge, of course, where one can relax and use the SQ lounge's wireless net access.
I went off to buy duty free booze, to ensure that I would be able to pay the friend who was picking me up in the desired currency. (... which, in this instance, is Frangelico.)
Usually the SYD-MEL and v.v. is almost empty. Often 4-6 seats upstairs taken. What a surprise when I saw every seat upstairs taken except 14B!
Aussie Open starting today was apparently responsible.
The guy sitting next to me was unexcited by flying, and understandably so. He used to be a 747 pilot for Ansett and has flown 747s between Japan and the USA for a freight company since Ansett collapsed. And home is still Melbourne. Another thing he's sick of is the dreaded "SSSS". He's always buying one-way tix in the USA, so he constantly gets the full TSA treatment. Poor guy.
We caught up again at baggage claim, which was an utter cock-up. All the ordinary bags came out first, long before the owners were there to collect them. Once the whole carousel was stacked 2-high with bags, they started dumping the "Priority" tagged bags out on top of them, so all the First and Business pax who'd been waiting 20 mins could (if they could reach) finally get them!
Location: Bellevue, WA, USA (and sometimes Melbourne, VIC, Australia)
Programs: UA, AS, Starwood, Marriott
Posts: 20
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kremmen
... baggage claim, which was an utter cock-up. All the ordinary bags came out first, long before the owners were there to collect them. Once the whole carousel was stacked 2-high with bags, they started dumping the "Priority" tagged bags out on top of them, so all the First and Business pax who'd been waiting 20 mins could (if they could reach) finally get them!
What, did you take some baggage handlers from SEA with you?
