A troublesome beginning

Monday, November 11, 2019   Cincinnati to Denver, trying for Los Angeles

This photo is in the International (Tom Bradley) Terminal at LAX on Tuesday morning, Nov 12. The clothes Janet is wearing, and what I'm wearing, had been on our bodies since the day before when we left Cincinnati, and we would be stuck in them for another two days!

It was a quite a hassle getting to our tour in Shanghai!

Our flight departed Cincinnati on Monday evening about two hours late. We thought we might still be leaving early enough to make our connection in Denver (about a one-hour delay), but during the delay, it began to snow hard. That meant de-icing, and it was such a lengthy de-icing that we didn't leave for almost another hour. Our moods were made worse by United's staff promising to make it up to us with special service (free beer?), but they never did anything special at all.

When we arrived in Denver, we had, of course, missed our connection to LAX. I received a text saying that we now were confirmed at 11 am the next day. However, that flight would get us there too late to make our flight on to Beijing. So, we walked a LONG ways to the service counter, only to find that the line there was hours long. Luckily, they had a wheelchair for Janet.

To avoid the line, I used a kiosk to search for an earlier flight than the one they had booked us on . I found three sooner flights, but the first two were full. Luckily, I was able to book a 9:37 am flight (why didn't United choose this flight rather than the 11 am one?), but even that one would arrive so late that we would likely still not be able to make our Beijing flight. Since I could not use the kiosk to put us on standby for the two sooner flights, we went all the way back to the gate for the 10:20 pm flight to LAX, and they did put us on standby. In the end, however, there was no room for us, so they put us on standby for the 8:11 am flight to LAX.

I had to cancel our LAX hotel, and we had to walk all the way back to the service counter to get our hotel and food coupons. (Luckily, the line had gone way down by then.) They bused us a long ways to a hotel in Denver, with a jam-packed shuttle that could not fit everyone who tried to board it. We worried all night about whether we'd make it onto the 8:11 flight, because our 9:37 confirmed flight would likely not work out.

Even though United gave us $40 in food coupons, nothing was open at the hotel, and we hadn't eaten since our pizza at the Cinci Airport at about 2 pm. I was stuck buying a muffin from the hotel lobby. It was 12:15 am (3:15 body time) before we could finally go to bed, and our wake-up call was for 5:15 am! We knew we'd need to wear the same clothes the next day, so we slept naked.