Arriving Ungodly Early in Houston

[canyonwalker]

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.