Havana Running Part 3: "Just Sit Anywhere"

 

Yessss!!

Since I last signed off in Seattle, there’s been a fair amount of flying going on… and not a whole lot of sleeping.  I’m currently sitting extremely happily on my flight to MIA.  First off, I was RIGHT about the plane.  It’s a reconfigured 757 set up for international flights, so that means lie flat in 1^st!  Now it really feels like a mileage run….it’s almost like I planned it that way (this time I didn’t, the tickets were way to fleeting for that).

 

In the past about 6 hours, I had a nice (if you can ever refer to domestic redeyes that way) flight to Dallas, and then dozed in the daybeds in the Centurion for about an hour, then had a long warm shower 7 breakfast.  Again- if you fly enough, these lounges make the card well worthwhile.  And no, Amex doesn’t pay me to say that…though if they wanted to work something out…..

Naptime @ DFW

After about a three hour layover, I boarded my third flight of the trip- DFW to MIA, and this brings us current.  Now, I pride myself on good airport timing.  I don’t like to cut things close, but I also don’t see the need to be hanging around the gate early getting impatient.  As we all know, the policy is that boarding starts 30 minutes out for domestic narrowbodies, and 45 or 1hour out for the big birds headed overseas.  This is a decent amount of time to get everyone settled, and it’s been this way for years.

However, more often than not lately I’ve showed up at T-30 to find things were already getting underway.  It’s not that I need to be first on the plane just for the sake of it, but with overhead bin space at a premium, part of the perks of status is that you don’t have to sweat it when it comes to finding space.

Today was completely ridiculous.  I rolled up at a perfectly timed 2 minutes to ‘boarding,’ to hear “this flight is now in final boarding, all ticketed passengers should be onboard.

Um, no.  That’s an announcement for 10 minutes out.  So….I crankily boarded with Group 8.  In the end I did find a place for my bags, and all was fine.  However, I wasn’t the only one thrown by the early boarding.  As it happens, other passengers figured the same as me, and so the boarding process didn’t wrap up early, it just took forever. 

It got to the point of comedy eventually, as the flight wasn’t completely full, and enterprising passengers kept changing their seats, making it hard for the crew to sort out who, in fact, was actually on the plane.  None of this was made better by a woman who as it turned out didn’t realize her seat assignment was actually on her ticket. She walked past me yelling to the flight attendant that her family “had seats together, but she didn’t know where” and so she was just going to “sit anywhere.”

Wow. 

MIA Centurion Food

Annnyhow….. due to the nice seats, the flight passed very quickly, and I woke up on descent into Miami.  Just enjoying one more stop at a Centurion Lounge, making it a perfect trifecta of visits on this itinerary, before getting on my last flight of the day (already??).  In a couple short hours I’ll be trying to find my way around Havana, so wish me luck!

~CruisingAltitude