Of Course We're Traveling this Weekend - PNW Again!

This evening is the start of a holiday weekend: Labor Day in the US. Of course we're traveling! We're going to back to the Pacific Northwest, with a flight to Portland, OR, in another hour of so.

"Weren't you just there a few weeks ago?" some might ask. Indeed we were! We visited the Pacific Northwest four week ago. We're kind of even starting this trip the same way, with the 8:05pm flight SJC-PDX. We'll see if this one leaves less late than the last one.

"When did you decide to go back?" some wonder. Honestly, we kind of decided this during the previous trip. 🤣 There were things we wanted to do in and around Mount St. Helens that we didn't have time for last month. It wasn't a given then that we'd come back now. It could've been two weeks from now.

Off to a Late Start

Pacific Northwest September Travelog #1
Still at SJC Airport - Fri, 2 Sep 2022, 8:10pm

Ah, delays. We're supposed to be taking off from San Jose now, en route to Portland, But instead we're still sitting in the terminal. Our flight has been delayed more than 90 minutes.



What's extra frustrating about this delay is that it shouldn't have been our flight. Our inbound aircraft arrived on time. Then it caught a 15 minute delay as the gate was occupied by the previous flight leaving 30 minutes late. 15 minutes wouldn't have been bad. But then as the aircraft docked Southwest decided to reassign it to another flight, leaving us waiting on a much later arriving aircraft. 😡

Delays like this are frustrating on what's already a short trip. Getting in late tonight means we won't be able to stop by a grocery store tonight to stock up for tomorrow. We'll be getting to the hotel around 12:30am, and the stores will all be closed. And we won't get to bed at a decent hour. So we'll be up later in the morning tomorrow, then have to swing by a grocery store to get breakfast food. The hotel's not going to have breakfast unless we want prepackaged sugary crap. Altogether this will cost us a few hours in the morning, on a day when we were hoping to maximize our use of daylight time going hiking.

Update: Even more of a pisser about this delay is that our 9:50pm departure is later than the 9:45pm Portland flight which is leaving on time. I considered booking that flight instead. It was cheaper and would've allowed us to eat dinner at home instead of paying inflated prices at the airport, but we decided to pay the extra money not to get in after midnight. Now we get the worst of both worlds: we get in late and we paid extra to have our time wasted. 😡