colonius

First off, my apologies that it took so long for me to report back – but either my connections were too short or the internet less than stellar (flaky at SYD Koru Lounge, non at MEL RCC).

I am now sitting in the HNL RCC, with a bit less than four hours to kill. I have just completed the LAX-SYD-MEL-SYD-SFO-LAX-HNL portion of my mileage run, with only minor mishaps to report.

LAX to SYD: seat 6J felt like supreme luxury (OK, as long as I don't compare to F-class on LH, CX, BA, ...). The service on board was very good and attentive and there is really nothing more to report than UA's culinary quirks. In the unlikely event that the powers at UA read this: V-A-R-I-E-T-Y is missing from C and F menus. The choices for the entree were exactly the same as on my last C class flight to Munich:

Pan-seared salmon with roasted fingerling potatoes, green beans and carrots
Braised Beef short-rib with red wine demi-glace, potato pancakes and roasted root vegetables
Spinach lasagna rolls with “Rosetta Sauce”

I had no real desire to try fish on an airliner since viewing the original Airport movie as a kid, solidly reaffirmed lately by the super-strong Mahi-Mahi that stank up the F-cabin on my last flight to SFO.

My pasta, I do like “al dente”, while United prefers to serve theirs somewhere between mushy and a texture that could be filled into little squeeze tubes and sold as astronaut food without further processing. Also, I really didn't want to know what “Rosetta Sauce” is. Crushed Rosetta stone in gravy?

That only left the beef for me. I prefer a solid steak over the “ready to fall apart” slow cooked roast served here, but in all honesty, it was quite tasty – as was the espresso ice-cream truffle.

The appetizer was not aptly named – at least I find the “Vegetarian Spring Roll” thoroughly unappetizing. If you haven't enjoyed one yourself: all kinds of raw veggies, mostly bean sprouts, get rolled into a big, tough leaf of cabbage, with no seasoning whatsoever. The menu claims that there were noodles in there, too. The whole unbelievable bland affair is served slightly above freezing with some soy sauce on the side. If you want to recreate taste and texture: dip some raw bean sprouts in soy sauce, chill, eat.

After having quite a number of glasses of an acceptable Cabernet Sauvignon (the Cote du Rhone was not so acceptable), I dozed off to almost nine hours of solid sleep – which is proving to be a life saver on this mileage run. I have no clue about the mid-flight snack, I slept through it. Breakfast was a variety of the “Standard Domestic First Class Breakfast” mentioned earlier. Since this is international business class, United throws in some chives into the egg-like object. Overall, a very pleasant flight.

In SYD, I had little time. A quick trip to the Koru Club with a bit of better breakfast was just about all I had time for. Re-boarded for MEL, another uneventful, if bumpy, flight – with a jokester for a captain. After a bumpy climb-out out of SYD, he came onto the PA with the following, more or less verbatim: “That wasn't me. After our first officer managed to find every pocket of turbulence out of Sidney, we are expecting a smooth ride now. More or less. Give or take. If we can find the railroad tracks to Melbourne, we should be there in about an hour”. That was just a small sample. Funny for the average Flyer Talker, probably not so much for a new and anxious flyer. I enjoyed it simply for being different!

In MEL, I proceeded to the international transfer door, as described in various postings here on Flyertalk. As expected, nobody was there. I rang the intercom. Somebody came one and I told him that I had an international transfer. He told me that the other 13 people in my party were already being processed and why I was so late? I had no clue what he was talking about (unless there was a secret FT mileage run party ahead of me) and just went ahead to tell him that I was there now and that they should be so nice to accommodate me. He finally agreed to send somebody down to “process” me.

I always shudder at that ill-conceived usage of the word “process”. You process cheese, meat and liverwurst. To process something means that it is fundamentally not the same as before processing. While I can see that we are getting closer to this with passengers getting irradiated by Nudo-Scopes and a loving massage by the TSA (with optional rectal exam) to top off the experience, it is still an abysmal word to use for the security-screening of people.

The RCC in MEL is interesting, once you manage to find it with all the constructions sites in that airport. Small, crowded and with probably the only Nespresso coffee machine in the whole system. Which is evidenced by all the cups of hot water standing around the machine, produced by buffoons that don't insert a capsule in the machine as per the instructions. Buffoons like me... No internet here and no help from the lovely lady at the front desk in obtaining boarding passes back to HNL. A variety of food that one would wish for back in the domestic RCCs.

To obtain my boarding cards, I had to go to the gate, where a mostly useless gate agent was stumped by the fact that I could be in front of her desk without having seen a check-in desk land-side. I explained that I was on an immediate turn-around mileage run, but I could as well have explained the Software Development Life Cycle to her. Or why there are crazy guys that do mileage run. Heck, I could have recited medieval German poetry and might not have met with a similar expression of blank incomprehension.

She finally managed to print the Lufthansa connection information for my connection in MUC (on a different itinerary) and nothing else! How on the planet did she manage to do that, especially considering the fact that the trip to Germany is on a different itinerary?

She then called for help – and now two agents were looking at the PNR and their computer screens with incomprehension. Finally, they managed to get boarding cards all the way to HNL. I boarded and checked my ongoing boarding cards. With some roar of disgust that shocked the passengers around me, I discovered that they had given away my exit row seat (45H, a nice one) and put me in a middle seat in row 49. I talked with the purser about that problem and he escorted me back outside to talk with the agents. They were “very sorry” but could do nothing but promise to call Sydney and ask them to straighten this out.

At least the purser took pity on me and reseated me in business class for SYD – MEL. That or because they really wanted to push back and the business seats were closer than economy. I could practically feel the aircraft door clanging shut behind me...

An uneventful, luxurious flight to SYD followed, with the same, slightly off-colour PA announcements by the captain.

More about the segments SYD-SFO, SFO-LAX and LAX-HNL to follow shortly, featuring the exit row seat from hell, “unobtrusive” service and the iSamaritan. “i” stands for idiot, in this case....