Trip report: BNE-DCI

Ding!

That’s the sound of a text message from Qantas. Excellent. You’re sending me this 24 hours before my flight, so this is probably good news, telling me that my upgrade has been granted by the Upgrade Gods. I stop work for a minute to open the text and - oh.

It’s a text from Qantas, yes, but it’s telling me that the BNE-LAX flight tomorrow is cancelled.

I’ll be automatically re-booked onto an alternative. And I am - the BNE-LAX flight a day later, which isn’t really very good for my schedule. I can go via Sydney, and just leave earlier, so I call and ask for that flight instead. Alas, no: that’s full. And so instead of a nice Saturday with the family before a 10pm flight to LAX, I have a 3.15am start to fly down to Melbourne, to catch the MEL-LAX flight which lands 12 hours early at LAX. Which means I rush my work and have about half an hour to pack, before going to bed for four hours. I am sure I’ve forgotten lots of things. (It turns out I didn’t pack a tie. Or my AirPods.)

Eli from customer services was very good, but left me with a cheery “they’re all very full flights so I’m afraid the best I can do is an aisle seat on all of them, there are no window seats left”. As soon as I see the flights appear on the website, I get window seats on all of them, so either Eli wasn’t trying very hard, or I’m better at this than he is.

Bright and early the next morning, my Uber driver wanted to chat. I made some polite attempts at my part of the conversation before realising that really my side wasn’t required, so listened to a 25 minute meandering soliloquy that started with his former work as a fly-in, fly-out mine worker, via being a single dad, he knew someone with 18 kids down the bottom of his street once, how many people he personally knows who have committed suicide, and how he deals with drunks in the back of the Uber - it’s all about the way you talk to them, apparently. I occasionally add “Ah!” and “Yeah” in an increasingly non-committal way, before trying to just not react at all, which makes no difference.

The 2.5hr flight down to Melbourne was nice enough. I got a complimentary upgrade, which they are currently giving Platinum flyers every so often to make you forget about the underinvestment in the airline’s fleet and the dodgy way it sold tickets on flights that it knew were already cancelled. “Thank you for your loyalty!”, says the boarding pass, conveniently forgetting that international flyers have little choice.

Melbourne Airport itself is the usual badly-signed mess. I’m pretty good at finding my way round airports, but the way-finding in the airport is pretty terrible: there’s one bit where you can stand and look at two signs pointing you to the same thing but in two entirely different directions. One of the benefit of a Platinum flyer is that you get a different security lane which is less busy, but apparently not in Melbourne any more - I get told off for walking into the business security lane. I look confused, wave my boarding pass, and cheerily say “don’t worry, I’m Platinum” and just keep walking, as a test to see if the security guard will come running up after me. She doesn’t come running after me. It doesn’t make much difference; at this time there isn’t a security queue anyway.

My Australian passport fails once more on the electronic readers. The passport office says it works fine, but it really doesn’t.

QF93, the 17 hour flight from MEL-LAX, is late to take off - late on the stand, apparently, and then the tug that pushes the plane off the stand has a flat battery. But we’re told that we will make good time - and that because of winds, we’ll be flying a route that will take us over Sydney and Brisbane on the way. Sigh.

My window seat is right at the front, next to the galley, which is quite busy throughout the flight. But it’s OK. A chicken salad was quite decent for a meal, and the only slight disappointment was that this flight is too long for my noise-cancelling headphone batteries, which gave out about 12 hours in. I get a few hours sleep - awoken once by Brendan on the public address speakers who was very excitedly telling us how he was going to reboot the entire plane’s in-flight entertainment to see if he could get it to work, and how it was important that we didn’t touch the screen. It takes 20 minutes to reboot it, so it appears to be powered by the Amstrad laptop I owned in the mid 1990s.

We are awoken to a serving of Vanessa’s Breakfast, Qantas’s speciality breakfast that is purpose-built for frugal financial management. Egg-flavoured wallpaper paste, bacon that is sliced so micron-thick it could make one small supermarket pack feed the entire aircraft, something that calls itself a hash brown that is a disc of soggy potato-flavoured wallpaper paste, some baked beans using a recipe by someone who has never eaten baked beans, a mystery sausage made from arseholes, and an angry-looking half-tomato. It’s enhanced by a surprise muffin, and a quite decent mango yoghurt which is carefully rationed by the FA, using the whispered phrase “and would you like a yoghurt on the side?”

Our flight lands over an hour late. It takes over an hour to get through immigration, with everyone else in the queue a bit nervous about connection times. I don’t care too much, because I’ll still have over 12 hours layover at LAX. My plan is to dump the bag, and go somewhere.

But, unfortunately, Qantas hasn’t checked my bag in to the Alaska flight. And more unfortunately, nor can I yet, since Alaska won’t check in a bag until 4 hours before the flight, and LAX has no baggage storage facilities. So my plan to wander about Venice beach was a little curtailed. I hit on a plan - a free hotel shuttle bus, and a lobby with coffee and food. The plan works!

Once Alaska let me check in, I visit their quiet lounge; and then the second red-eye in two days. Just before the doors close, a sleep-looking man comes and sits next to me. By the smell of him, he’s been smoking all the cannabis in Los Angeles: He flicks through TikTok, with the speaker blaring two-second clips of what passes as music these days, then reaches into a black garbage bag that he took onto the flight and got out some sticky ribs, which he proceeds to much his way through. Pot man also turned up with a small cup of water, which he strategically placed at his feet. I was wondering about this. It turns out that after the sticky ribs, pot man uses the cup of water to wash his fingers. Of course, later in the flight, the cup of dirty water tips over onto the airplane carpet. Mmm.

I’ve never flown Alaska before. It’s a OneWorld airline, and doesn’t seem to be the biggest; I think this route is one that was a Virgin America one, perhaps. But the plane is quite new (no IFE, but a power outlet); and it all seems decent enough.

My flight takes off 15 minutes late because one of the flight crew was on a different flight that was delayed; but lands just 4 minutes late, at 5:44am, in Dulles International which is an Actually Quite Nice American Airport. From there, it’s a 40 minute Uber to the hotel, where in spite of turning up at 7am to check in, they give me a room and I gratefully have a bit of a snooze. That was a lot of travel. And I’ve plenty more to come.