What a difference a day makes - Las Vegas to New York

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You know how airlines always tell you to get to the airport in plenty of time, usually several hours before the flight? Why? Why do they do that? You get there within the time window they specify, just because, but then you have several hours to kill with nothing much to do. But, being good at following instructions, we get there at the suggested time and check our luggage in but we never, EVER, go through into Departures until much closer to boarding time. That’s a bit too much like being caged up in a confined space and we prefer to kick around the airport and its environs, where you can always go outside and soak up the sunshine, look at the views, chat to the people or have a cigarette. So, we huffed and puffed a bit when the airport shuttle service said they would collect us at 7.10 am for a flight to New York at 10.55 am, especially as we knew the airport was only ten minutes away but hey, what can you do?

As it happened, Steve was still printing out our boarding passes for our onward flight to New York at 7.00 am, as we were checking out, but 10 minutes was ample time to do this and our shuttle arrived bang on time to pick us up (why are they never late when you want them to be?!). We couldn’t even waste any time collecting other travellers as we were the only ones in the transport. Ho hum. So we arrived at Las Vegas airport at 7.20 am where the check-in desk was on the street outside (why, when the concourse was empty inside?) which was a first for us but it was efficient so we had no complaints, though it was a bit unnerving to just abandon our luggage on a public footpath.

We’d only packed clothing for warm weather for our RTW trip. When our initial plans had included the icebergs in southern Chile our plan had been to find the local equivalent of Primark and buy cheap, throw-away, cold weather clothing then. As it happened we didn’t go to Patagonia so we’d had no need to do that and we’d been lucky, on the whole, with warmth, even in New Zealand where the weather was wet but not too cold and nothing that a fleece (which I was sick of wearing) and an electric blanket at night couldn’t cope with. We had taken ‘dual-purpose’ clothing where we could. I had a couple of sun dresses that could double up as nighties, tee shirts that could go with pyjama bottoms and my only coat (apart from the trusty cagoule) was a raincoat that doubled up as a dressing gown. Steve had swimwear that could double up as shorts and a bulky top coat that couldn’t do much other than be a top coat and hadn’t been out of the suitcase until now. And that kind of explains why we were standing in 84 degree heat in Las Vegas looking like the male and female versions of the Michelin Man and Mrs Blobby dressed in sweltering jeans, socks and trainers and carrying and wearing layer upon layer of clothing because in New York it was apparently, literally, freezing!

We mooched about outside the airport for a while, people-watching everyone coming and going, but the heat became too much for us in our inappropriate apparel and we found ourselves a nice, quiet, air-conditioned area in a secluded spot inside the airport and just outside the airport Post Office. We still hadn’t managed to post anything home from America and, even wearing a significant amount of our clothing, we were touch and go on the luggage weight limit. We’d maxed out our hand luggage allowance on this occasion (no-one ever weighed that and we made a point of casually throwing it over our shoulders and/or dangling it, seemingly weightlessly, from a little finger when checking in) but we still hoped to be able to finally post something home. No such luck, the Post Office was closed. Nevertheless, we were quite happy looking down on the arrivals baggage hall, which had slot machines for the newcomers to spend their dollars on while they waited for their bags to come through!

At 9.20 am, I wandered outside for a final cigarette before moving through into the Departure lounge, with a whole 90 minutes still in hand. Imagine my horror when I saw that the queue, which had been non-existent when we arrived, was now a mile long (slight exaggeration there, but not by much)! I did a hasty return to Steve, rounded him up with frantic one word explanations (QUEUE, hideous, departure, QUEUE, flight, miss, QUEUE, now, move, QUEUE) and we joined the back of the snake-like, sloooooow-moving, log-jam of people. It rapidly became apparent that there were just not enough airport staff to cope with the volume of travellers. We spent some time just standing, going nowhere, and it dawned on us that at this speed we were going to miss our flight. I approached the man who was checking the first class/disabled/other priority people through a much quicker process but he was unsympathetic and told me to rejoin the QUEUE. So, after a quick debate and after deciding a woman (me) stood more chance of a positive response than a man (Steve) – at least that’s what Steve decided – I played on my stupidity as an Englishwoman in Las Vegas and adopted my best impression of an immediately recognisable ‘Brit Abroad’ accent and began to work my way down the QUEUE, one person/group of people at a time saying ‘Excuse me, I’m terribly/frightfully/awfully sorry to ask but we have misjudged our times and we may miss our flight so could we possibly leap-frog in front of you, thank you sooooo much ... ‘ And man, that QUEUE was long. We gathered quite an audience as we made our way along, Steve following behind as a ‘plus one’. Some people were happy to oblige, without question; others moved significant numbers of their party out of the way for us; some asked what time our flight was before waving us by; one man told us to shortcut by just ducking underneath the tapes but I felt I had to ask everyone ahead of us, just to play fair; one group cheered ‘Go, girl’ every time we moved forward; we only came to a stop when we hit someone on the same flight as us (fair enough) but we were close enough to the front of the QUEUE by that time for it not to matter. Phew! For some reason we never understood we were, apparently, ‘already TSA approved’ (whatever that means!) and we were allowed to keep our shoes on through Security (every minute saved helped) and we dashed down to our departure gate to find ... there was a delay and everyone was just milling around, waiting to board (but not in a QUEUE!). Nevertheless, the moral of this story is if you’re already at the airport go straight through to Departures or run the risk of a coronary or a missed flight (though we probably won’t ....).

We were travelling to New York, via Chicago, with Southwest Airlines who have the monopoly in Las Vegas which isn’t too surprising given that it’s in the south west of the country. The online reviews of the airline hadn’t been too positive and I had visions of an American version of Ryanair. No seats were allocated but everyone was in a boarding ‘group’, depending on how early on the booking had been made. On this leg of the journey we were in Group B but the process was pretty unfathomable to us and a lovely fellow passenger told us what to do and where to stand. On this occasion I was legitimately able to leapfrog those in the QUEUE where our boarding number was before theirs – I never figured out why they didn’t just give everyone a seat number, rather than a boarding number ... We were able to choose our seats after Group A had boarded but before everyone else, so that was fine.

Now, I know bugger all about aircraft but I have noticed that over the years the wings have developed tippy up bits at the ends. Somebody once told me it was so they would fit in the old aircraft hangars but even gullible old me found that hard to believe. Anyhoo, this plane had a tippy up bit on the end of the wing AND a tippy down bit. That was a bit worrying, as if the engineer couldn’t decide which way the tippy bit should go and I wanted no unnecessary, confusing, undecided bits on my plane, thank you. But, in fact, the whole experience was pretty good, with attentive, friendly, smiling staff and the journey was pretty too. We flew out over the desert, then began to see rivers, then flew over the snowy Rocky Mountains before flying over Lake Michigan and descending into Chicago Midway Airport, which had a display about the Battle for Midway Island for some reason I couldn’t understand. I particularly liked that the whole crew came out to see us off the plane, Captain n’all, after saying they knew that we had a lot of choice when it came to service providers (did we, we hadn’t noticed) and they appreciated that we had given our custom to them. It was cheesy, but a nice touch.

We thought we had quite a layover in Chicago, before our onward flight to New York. It turned out that we’d moved into a different time zone, losing two hours, so there actually wasn’t much hanging around time before our next flight. I was just glad we’d noticed the time change (nobody mentioned it), as the thought of going through a whole other round of ‘Excuse me, I’m dreadfully sorry but ...’ was just too much to bear. No nipping out for a quick Chicago sight-see for us! As it was, the temperature in Chicago was only 34 degrees (a whole 50 degrees less than in Las Vegas) so that was enough of a shift to cope with and we were thankful for our ‘layers’. We were even more thankful for them on our next plane, which was decidedly chilly, but the views over the Great Lakes more than compensated. It was a lovely flight with efficient staff and I made a point of telling them that both of our flights had been really good – they seemed surprised but were pleased to hear it.

Our flight to Newark Airport, New York was scheduled to take 1 hour 30 minutes and we lost another hour during the flight, arriving at 10.20 pm. Jeez, it was cold, even in the airport and we put on every item of clothing we had available to us to the point where my raincoat almost wouldn’t button up. We rang the transfer people we had arranged to take us to our hotel to let them know we had arrived but they were less than efficient so we sat about waiting, getting colder and colder. When they eventually arrived we moved outside to the minibus and saw that the temperature was minus 2 degrees. A whole 86 degrees less than it had been in Las Vegas earlier in the day ... ! We eventually rounded up more passengers for the transfer but one person was nowhere to be found so we set off without him. Our journey into New York took us about an hour and the views of the city at night were amazing, with all the well known sights lit up like Christmas and instantly recognisable. We eventually checked in to room 301 at the Radio City Apartments, just off Broadway, more than ready to relax and chill out, but not literally on this occasion, as thankfully the room was lovely and warm. We looked forward to exploring NYC, cold n’all.

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