wendolene & I had breakfast at the Marriott before our flights -- it is one of the best (and expensive) breakfasts around. wendolene loves the Muesli and the yogurt, deriding the American product as something unworthy of the name.

When we reached the airport, for some reason Swissair was unable to give my the First Class boarding pass for CVG-SFO (their system was unable to see the upgrade). I knew that my upgrade had cleared on this segment, since I read my itinerary on the Delta web site. I had to go over to the Delta ticket desk, where they processed the upgrade and gave me a seat (but still no boarding pass, I would have to take care of that in CVG).

I did not check any bags, since I only had a rollerboard and my computer bag. I did check bags on the outbound, since wendolene had bags to check, and I would have to wait anyway. But she was going on to Germany at this point, so that was no longer a constraint. In general, I am not one of those people who try to cram a lot of bags on the plane, but I will take on the rollerboard if I know I will be on a plane and class that can handle it. And I will put a bag under the seat in front of me. (I'm so good!).

After a brief stop in the business class lounge of Swissair, where we Delta flyers are still welcome (for the time being?), I said my goodbyes to wendolene, fought through the cloud of cigarette smoke in the lounge and went to the gate. Although there are both a smoking and non-smoking room (divided by a glass wall), the whole lounge reeks of smoke. Swissair has also established a distinct "smoker's lounge" at Zurich, which is purported to have cigars, cognacs, fine scotch and other trappings of deluded alpha males. I cannot imagine something move lovely than sitting next to a cigar-reeking likkered up seatmate on some long flight...

I was in seat 1G on the flight to CVG. The bulkhead on the 767 looks less roomy than the other seats, but I didn't feel cramped. The gentleman in the seat next to me had boarded with another person, presumably his wife, and ultimately was reseated before takeoff, so I had both seats to myself.

There were obviously some new FA's in training on this flight, and they committed some faux pas that didn't bother me at all, but were of great consternation to the French-speaking gentlemen in the row behind me. There was also a lot of confusion about running the movies on the personal video screens -- the first cycle didn't start until 90 minutes into the flight (should be 30), when it did, only one movie was running ("Sunset Boulevard"), until I pointed this out to an F.A. (these type of things are the sacred duties of the Front Row). Later cycles did not start without prompting from myself of others in the Front Row.

The pretend-fancy appetizer was pretty bad. Come to think of it, I never see airline type appetizers on any restaurant menu... The salad was OK, with a few too many wilted greens for my taste. Every restaurant in Switzerland has wonderful "Gruener" or "gemischter Salat"(green and mixed, thanks wendolene for e-mailing me the right German spellings!), I wonder why salads on the airlines leaving Europe are so uninspired. It is like they tell the local food staff to forget everything they know.

After picking on the preliminaries (in honestly, I has a big breakfast, so I wasn't exactly starving), I received the main course of turbot, which was wretched. It was hard to believe anything so dry ever lived in the water.

Due to the fact that the whole meal was way below Delta's normal standards, and the fact that the plane was moving around like a subway train (not scary, just a lot of left-to-right bumpiness), I decided to stop eating at this point, and reflect on the wisdom of Dave Barry, who defined turbulance as the part of the flight where the meal is served.

Speaking of turbulance, I am always interested in observing how the captains employ the seat belt sign. A lot of Delta captains seem to have a hair-trigger on this; I have had flights where the light is on practically the whole flight. On some European carriers, it seems that unless the plane is upside-down, the light does not come on. This captain was more of the latter style.

About 6 hours into the flight, I started to get hungry. Soon afterward, an FA came by with a cart with some snacks: A bag of potato chips (I only saw one), some dried fruit, Kit-Kat bars and a box of Chocolates. I took the Kit-Kat bar (wafers covered in chocolate). One warning -- these things melt in your hand before they melt in your mouth. I noticed I had chocolate on my blanket, my pillow...

I watched 3 movies, napped a little bit. We were served another meal (I chose poorly again, an oriental chicken noodle salad that sounded a lot better than it was).

This was my first flight on a Delta-operated plane with my new Platinum Medallion status. Interestingly enough, I was always addressed by name in Business Elite, but not on this flight. All pronouns here. This doesn't bother me at all, but it was interesting to observe (maybe it was because of the trainees).

I was the first through immigration at CVG, and I directly went through customs, since I had no checked baggage. Certainly, Delta has some of the better ports-of-entry for these sorts of things (OK, not JFK).

I quickly got my boarding pass in the CRC, then went to the gate where the flight for SFO was already boarding. This was an antique 727 with (honest!) wood paneling. It came equipped with a 3-man flight crew. I reflected what it must have been like for the pioneers who first settled the west -- no movies, no audio systems, no Empower outlets for their laptops.

I was fairly hungry -- fortunately, the food on this flight was much better: a smoked trout and cream cheese wrap, a good salad, Omaha steak with Thai sauce, and the standard issue sundae. Service was wonderful, we were offered drinks every 20 minutes of so. And there were lots of announcements from the cockpit (since it was dark for half the flight, nothing could really be seen, so these were updates of where we were-- kind of a moving map display for the visually impaired). This probably would have annoyed me if I were trying to sleep, but I wasn't.

So those are the details. Or, as I summarized it to wendolene by e-mail last night when she asked how it went, "nothing unusual".



[This message has been edited by opus17 (edited 01-10-2000).]