Thank You, William Shatner
Posted on | June 11, 2009 at 7:41 pm | 3 Comments
Here’s yet another attempt to get back into this blogging thing. I’m going to skip the lists of exercising songs for now. Suffice it to say that I am going to the gym whenever I can (3-4 days a week) and I still listen to an eclectic array of random tunes from my iPod nano “fast tempo” playlist. Just yesterday, it decided to play three Cinerama songs in a 45 minute period. Since most Cinerama songs seem to deal with cheating on your partner, I choose not to listen to the message the iPod is evidently trying to send me.
Anyway, I was on vacation last week, and actually traveled for the first time in a long time. The experience of getting to place to place itself was actually fairly pleasant this time. We flew Southwest Airlines to Philly like last year, but this year I understood that you have to do the online check-in and print your boarding pass at home in order to get decent seats on this non-seat assignment budget airline. Although I screwed up the timing for the flight out and did the check-in 23 hours before the flight instead of 24, and so we ended up in the high “B” boarding group. But N and I still got seats together on the full flight, so that was nice. On the flight back, which was just me alone, I didn’t have Internet computer access, but was able to do the online check-in on my iPhone through Southwest’s mobile site, and then printed out the boarding pass at the airport bag check kiosk. This time, I got into the high “A” group, but since there weren’t many people in the low “A” group, I was one of the first people on the plane. The flight wasn’t anywhere near full and I had a row all to myself. I was surrounded by babies in the front and across the aisle, but they were all well-behaved and quiet.
Southwest is growing on me, even though I still don’t like not having assigned seating. The people are always pleasant and they keep things moving fast. Not charging for checking bags is definitely a big plus, as it makes the flights even cheaper compared to other airlines than they already were. There’s no meals on the flights, but at least they’ll give you pretty much infinite packs of snack crackers and such if you whine even a little bit. I don’t miss having a TV screen, as I prefer to spend flights reading. And the seats are fairly comfortable – N thinks that the legroom has gotten bigger since last year.
For a rental car, I took InfK’s advice and tried Priceline.com this year. That worked out very well. Not only did I get a much better price than if I had booked directly, but also the company turned out to be Hertz, which I’ve never used before. Of course they didn’t have an economy car like I booked, so they upgraded me free to a brand new Mercury Sable with Sirius XM satellite radio and a GPS navigator system – both a first for me. I could get used to that kind of luxury. The automatic seat positioning was cute but not all the accurate. I think it kept automatically resetting the side rear view mirrors also, which was annoying. The GPS came in handy on the 2.5 hour drive up north and worked pretty well. My only complaint is that sometimes it wasn’t quite as explicit with the voice directions as I’d like (for example, not always specifying whether you should take the “north” or “south” highway exit if they were both on the same side). And on the drive back to the airport, it had me take a route that had me paying higher tolls than if I had just went the route I was familiar with. So the lesson there is Trust With Caution.
The one glitch I had with the car was not figuring out exactly how the headlights worked immediately. I think I drove out of Philly at night with only the parking lights on for a little while. Luckily it wasn’t too dark yet. Dang American automobiles and their impenetrable foreign hieroglyphics!
Latre.
Pet Peeve of the Day: The AAA application for the iPhone refuses to validate my membership number.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “most irrational phobia on record”.
Videogame(s) Played Since Last Blog Update: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (DS)
Comments
3 Responses to “Thank You, William Shatner”
June 11th, 2009 @ 8:49 pm
Welcome back. When we fly cross-country on Southwest for business we ‘upgrade’ to business class which puts you at the front of the A-group and a free cocktail. Hey, as long as I don’t have to pay for it.
June 12th, 2009 @ 12:49 am
Nice to see some activity around this place. Although I see you’ve been providing the Twitter-stream with a goodly supply of Flasshisms.
I liked SW, but I think they shaved some off of the width of the seats. I got a good deal on a rental from SW’s site. I think it was with Budget.
I love the GPS units (I took my own). I made the mistake of not having one for a trip to Daly City and regretted it the moment I left SFO in the dark! As for American cars, they should just have the lights on all the time. I like the automatic setting.
June 13th, 2009 @ 11:55 pm
I thought this site was going dark when the analog broadcast system gets turned off.