When you sit in the main terminal of SeaTac airport, sipping a wonderful cup of drip coffee and gazing out the window at the passing planes, it is easy to miss the gate switch announcement in the East terminal and the early boarding call for your flight to Austin. At least, that is exactly what happened to me. I arrived at my E gate just four minutes after my flight had left from another gate, but right on time for boarding had everything lined up as expected. Start of a long day.
According to the very friendly (and very helpful) Alaska Airlines Customer Service agent, this was the only Alaska Airlines flight leaving for Austin on this particular day. If I had not used Rewards Miles to book my ticket, I could have been switched over to a flight to Chicago, then caught an American Airlines flight to Austin at no charge. The ticket was cheap enough when I bought it, I agreed that that would have been a most convenient scenario. As it was, Alaska Airlines could get me to Houston. Could I get someone to pick me up there?
I was very close to turning around and boarding a flight back to Alaska. This was not how I wanted my vacation to start, especially with no sleep the night before. Feeling close to tears, hearing Anchorage and Fairbanks tossed around in the sentences of passing strangers made me slightly homesick.
"No one can pick me up in Houston. I need to get to Austin by tomorrow. Is there a commuter flight?"
Forty-five minutes after starting this conversation at the Customer Service counter and $165.00 later, I had a flight to Houston on Alaska Airlines, with a flight from Houston to Dallas and Dallas to Austin on a commuter airline. Arrival time: 11:30 pm Central time. No less than 21 hours after I arrived in the Fairbanks airport. It would be a long day, full of bad airport food and stale air. Thank goodness for reports to edit while waiting and Alaska-grown produce from Calypso Farm.
