Tuesday, July 05, 2005

In transit

I took the red eye out of Kailua-Kona last night and arrived into SFO at some stupidly early hour in the morning...


United 36 out of KOA bound for SFO

I must admit at this point to committing one of the cardinal sins of the frequent traveller, not reading the return itinerary particularly carefully. You tend to get a bit blasé about travelling after a while, and just figure things will work out...

In the past this has left me on La Palma scheduled for an inter-island flight which would get me into Tenerife North with only 40 minutes between landing and take off of my connecting flight at Tenerife South. For those of you who haven't been out to the Canary Islands, Tenerife South is about 40 minutes drive from Tenerife North and not, as the secretary booking the flights assumed, another terminal in the same airport.

Well this time when I finally got round to reading my inbound itinerary properly, which was about 20 minutes before landing in SFO in an attempt to figure out what flight to get on next, I discovered that I was stuck in San Francisco for 7 hours. I'm currently sitting at my departure gate, which was about 50 meters walk from my arrival gate, debating whether to try and get into the city for a few hours rather than camp out in the airport.

However I'm fairly comfortable here, unlike LAX there is actually a fairly decent food court air side, and of course the terminal is more or less fully covered by the T-Mobile wireless network. It also looks to be raining outside, so I might just stay put...

Update: They seem to have moved all the international flights to a brand new terminal building since last time I had an international connection at SFO, which really only goes to prove that I'm flying through LAX too much. Apparently I'm not 50 meters way from my departure gate, I'm in entirely the wrong terminal. Perhaps it also proves you can become a bit too blasé, time to go hunting for this new building. I knew I should have flown via Vancouver.

Update: So they have a shiny new terminal building, can anyone tell me why it appears to be almost entirely empty? It feels like a ghost town here...


The empty halls of SFO's International Terminal

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