Arriving Ungodly Early in Houston

Panama Travelog #2
IAH Airport - Sun, 22 Dec 2024. 6am.

We're headed to Panama. Now we're farther than a mere 10 miles away from home; we're about halfway there. We're making a connection in Houston.

Our flight from SJC-IAH was the awfullest form of a red-eye: one that leaves at red-eye time, 10:55pm in this case, and arrives painfully early; 4:23am in this case. 😖 With the timezone change it was 2:23am for us. Wakey-wakey, time for a middle-of-the-night airport shuffle! 😵

Even worse, it was 4.5 hours until our connecting flight would board. What is there to do at 4:30am at an airport? Unfortunately, virtually nothing.

IAH's Concourse E looks beautiful. There are big, wide corridors with extremely high ceilings, and plenty of interesting-looking restaurants with huge displays. Alas, at 4:30am all these are CLOSED.

A few eateries in the food court area did open by about 5am, so we bought a few basics there to tie ourselves over. Why not go to the United Club Lounge? you ask. The club lounge doesn't open until 5:30am! And we did go to the lounge, once it opened. We get free access when traveling internationally, a benefit of my Premier Gold status. But now that we're in the lounge I'm glad we ate out in the main concourse. The pickings here are slim.

Landing in Panama

Panama Travelog #3
Tócumen Airport, Cd. Panama, Panama - Sun, 22 Dec 2024. 3:30pm.

Our flight from Houston to Panama City was uneventful. Largely it was uneventful because wifi didn't work. That meant, among other things, there were no on-demand movies or TV shows to stream to our personal devices. There was just a small assortment of TV channels on the seat-back TV screens, like it was 2010 again. It's good I slept most of the flight. I was really tired from the awful red-eye we flew into Houston. Basically as soon as the plane started taxiing I nodded off... and didn't wake, except to tell the purser No, I don't want breakfast, until we were halfway there.



I had a window seat on the port side of the plane this time. Usually I'm not in a window seat, but on this flight I booked a first class seat. No, I didn't get upgraded, I bought it. At booking time it was only slightly more expensive than a coach seat, so I paid extra. And no, this wasn't gonzo first class like that free upgrade to United Polaris class we caught on the way home from Australia a year ago. This was just a bigger seat plus free, not-top-shelf booze; the kind of first class you see domestically in the US.

Anyway, with the window seat I enjoyed looking out the window as we made our final approach into Panama City. We passed right over the Pacific Ocean terminus of the Panama Canal. In the photo above you can see a highway bridge crossing the canal as a container ship (lower right) steams north into the canal.



We also saw lots of views of downtown Panama City. ...Wow, that's a lot of skyscrapers! Most of them look like residential towers, which makes me wonder what the economic base is here. It seems unlikely there's actual industry as much as there is a cottage— or should I say, condo— industry in providing second homes and escape plans for affluent people in troubled countries across Central and South America.

We landed at PTY pretty much on time and taxied up to our gate. My first thought upon exiting to the jet bridge was Wow, it's warm here. I'm dressed in trousers and a long-sleeve shirt, carrying a light jacket; typical attire for SF Bay Area weather last night, a bit under-dressed for Houston weather this morning (not that I went outside at all), and sweltering here in tropical Panama.

My second thought as I prepared to set foot on terra firma in Panama, was this restaurant sign glaring at me all the way down the jetbridge:



Yes, ¡Me encanta ese pollo de Popeye's! I didn't expect to see American brands dominate the landscape as much as they do here in Panama. It's not just Popeye's, BTW; it's other fast-food restaurants and name-brand chain stores up and down the airport concourse.