We will never fly standby at Christmas!!!

---

We got home from LA in News Years Eve. We were very lucky. Most days the flights from LA to Houston were completely overbooked. Thursday look the best with a couple of flights with seats. Russ drove us to LAX at 6 am for a 9 am flight. We got there in 40 minutes instead of the usual 1 to 2 hours. We got on the 8 am flight to Houston instead of the 9 am flight. We then could not get on the next 2 flights to Colorado Springs from Houston. The last flight at 6pm looked just as bad so we tried to get on Denver flights. We missed the first but we got the last 2 seats on the next flight. There was one more flight that day if we had needed it. We were also prepared to spend the night in Houston.

I had reserved a rental car in Denver for Thursday night and Friday morning. A few years ago we got on a Northwest flight from Minneapolis to Denver, because the flights to Colorado Springs looked were impossible. We arrived in Denver at 11pm and there were no rental cars left. We took a cab home. The 90 mile trip would have cost $150, but I told the cab driver that we only had $120 (we lied). A few friends asked why we didn't call them at midnight for a ride. It is 3 hours round trip by car. I couldn't do that We rented the car on New Years eve and got home by 11 pm.

Dave warned us many times about flying standby at holidays.

The new Continental 757s have on demand video and movies in the seatbacks of all seats. I found the game Bejeweled, which my copy is called Diamond mine. We both played it all on both flights. Talk about brain dead

---