Griffin's BotCon Adventure (non-news bits).
This'll just have some of my mostly pre-con highlights, and won't include any actual news - I'll post that in the news sections when the time comes.
Well, I finally got here (Cincinnati). But for a number of reasons, it wasn't looking good.
I got to bed on sunday night later than I wanted, and then ended up not being able to sleep at all, mostly due to being nervous about the trip. So despite this year's international flight leaving from Brisbane, and not through Sydney (which requires a 5am flight from Brisbane to Sydney first), I had the opportunity to sleep the night before (I don't risk sleeping on the years when I have to fly to Sydney because I would have to rely on an alarm to wake me up before 3am). So it was a waste having the night to sleep this year, and being too nervous to actually get any sleep.
So I decided to get up a little before 5am, to get the last of the stuff printed up, emailed and packed, for a scheduled departure time of 8am.
As usual, I was late, and left home about 8.30. Caught a bus and train to the airport (cheapest option), and arrived at 10am. I should have been there at 9.30am, for the 1 & 1/2 hour check-in requirement on international travel, and as such, I looked to be the last person checking in. It wouldn't have been so bad if it were previous years, but this year I was checking in luggage to America, as opposed to just packing light enough to be able to be able to take my bag on the plane with me.
It wouldn't have mattered much, because once we were all on board and the plane pulled away from the terminal to do it's pre-flight checks, an announcement was made by the captain to inform us that a warning light for engine 1 wouldn't let them go until it was checked by ground staff.
For the next hour, we were sitting there as 4 or 5 maintenance staff started openning up parts of the engine looking for the fault. (I had a window seat looking out over the engine, so have a couple of photos on my phone to post here later)
Then the announcement was made that we would be towed back to the departure gate for us to be let off, because they needed at least 2 hours to replace some computer parts in the engine.
So now a scheduled 11am flight was going to be at least 2pm, and would mean missing my connecting flight in LA.
Before we were let off, another announcement was made, to let us know that we would each be given a $15 food voucher to use in the Airport food court, plus given a little tub of juice. (aww, that oughta be sufficient compensation...)
So while I was still sitting there in the plane waiting to be let back off, I was thinking of what I would spend the food voucher on, and decided to get out my keycard/credit cards in case I went over $15.
I couldn't find them!!!
I searched my pockets and backpack (which I had in the plane with me), but they were no where to be seen.
I started panicking. What if I had left them at home? I wouldn't have any of the money I had been saving up these last few weeks, and I probably wouldn't even be able to get into the hotel if they needed to physically verify and swipe the Credit Card I used in the booking.
Okay, so 2 hour delay - I started thinking that it would be enough time to get a taxi home and back again. It would be expensive, but spending about $140 to be able to spend 3 grand would be a necessary expense. Unfortunately, the airport people wouldn't let me leave the airport if I had luggage checked in and loaded on the plane (I could be a terrorist, planting a bomb and not returning). The one year I check in luggage, and it prevents me from being able to go home to get my cards.
I needed a new idea.
Okay, I rang up one of the people who rents the upstairs part of the house I live in (I rent the downstairs level), to see if they were at home and to beg them to go into my part of the house and look for my cards. I remembered where they were before I packed, and didn't do much after I packed before I left (I have everything out ready to pack, but pack my bags just before I go so that I have fresh in my mind that I have everything on my checklist). The problem was, I was having a total blank on what I did with my cards while I was packing everything away. I should have put them in my jeans pockets with my money and passport, but for some reason didn't do that, or even remember to do it.
So the other person was looking around, but couldn't find them. Where could they be. The only things I could think of were, they were in my checked in bag (shouldn't be, and I don't remember putting them in there), I lost them on the way to the airport (fell out of my pocket while pulling money out to pay for public transport), or, in my shorts pocket at home (I was wearing them the last time I remember seeing the cards, and could have put them in my pockets by accident).
There wasn't much I could do now. I couldn't ask the person looking for my cards to go through my dirtly cloths basket to check my pockets, and I wouldn't be able to check my checked-in bag for about another 13 hours in LA. All I could do is just wait it out, and just hope that they were accidently packed in my checked-in bag. I was so annoyed with myself, because this was ninth BotCon adventure and not double-checking the money side of things before I left home was like a newbie mistake.
So now I was in the food-court at the Brisbane International Terminal, and I use the words 'food-court' very loosely. The BIT is still a very small airport - it has only been servicing direct flights to America for less than four years (I was actually on the very first direct US flight for BC04, coincedentally), and the terminal only has about 14 departure gates. So as you can expect, the number of retail outlets in this particular airport is only about 7, with 4 of them being food outlets. So imagine the scene of about 350 people all wanting to use food vouchers at these four tiny food outlets.
It actually took an hour to get something from the Eagle Boys Express Pizza outlet. The turnover for that one day would probably equal a few months of trade for them. Unless QANTAS does this sort of thing often (mechanical failures seem to be getting quite common since they moved their fleet maintenance to Indonesia a couple of years ago).
So you have about 350 people each with a $15 meal voucher, plus dozens of passengers QANTAS have to pay for new connections, transfer fees or accomodation in LA (if their connection was a one-per-day type of route), all adding up and probably being written off as a tax deduction, so doesn't affect the QANTAS exec's opinion of using cheap foreign maintence crews that were so bad, they were featured on 60minutes with photos of the dodgy work being done.
While I was waiting for the pizza queue to disapate, I harassed Demonac for a while by phone. It helped relieve some of the stress of the missing cards.
Before we were called back to the plane, I phoned my travel agent, who was great in being able to check my connecting flight options, and booked me onto the next on, which was an hour and 10 minutes later. Hopefully enough time if they fixed the problem soon and there were no other delays. Otherwise, the travel agent told me that the next connection was 11 hours later, and I would be missing the first night of my hotel reservation.
Back on board by 2.30pm, we took off 20minutes later, almost 4 hours behind schedule!!!!
Everyone on my side of the plane was looking at the faulty engine as we took off, expecting it to fall off or explode. It had a bit of smoke come out of it, like an old car being started, but that fortunately was the only problem I noticed during the flight.
The pilot must have floored it though, as we managed to make up about 30minutes. The first thing I did when I picked up my checked-in bag was look for my credit cards, and yes, they were in there. Phew! I still don't even remember putting them in. They must have been caught up in something else.
The Customs lady who processed me was quite amused at my reason for visiting the US, and noticed on the computer that I had been doing this almost every year since 1999. Well, at least she didn't think I was a terrorist and no one ever heard from me again.
Once again, if I hadn't been taking any checked in luggage, I would actually have been able to make my connecting flight, because it had been delayed by 30 minutes.
Not to worry though. As it turned out, we got out of LA really quickly (it is a really bad airport, and most flights can take up to half an hour between pulling away from the gate to taking off), and we arrived at Cincinnati airport 30minutes early. So after all those delays and problems, I only ended up being about 45 minutes later checking into the hotel than when I expected to be here.
The first night is always a nothing night if checking in after dark, so all I did was get some food (pizza shop was the only thing interesting that was open), watch some TV, post here (signed up for an internet 'day pass' for only US$10 - compared to $2-3 an hour at the hotels last year), get cleaned up and go to bed (shortly). It's now about 2.30am here (which would be about 4.30pm East Aus time), and I need to get up early tomorrow morning to check out some hotel details - the second hotel that was offered, is indeed closer to the convention centre (now that I know for sure where it is), as Saintly had suggested to me. And it has an undercover walkway to the convention centre, to protect all the toys from the rain that is forecast for the convention weekend. THe Botcon website gave me the impression that the first hotel was part of the convention centre (said it was next to it), but is actually on the other side of a four way intersection. And it is more expensive than the second hotel, the better hotel. Only problem is that if I change hotels, I have to let Saintly know before he gets here later in the week, and it seems that I didn't have his phone number written down in my notebook as I had thought I did. So if anyone here knows his mobile number, please send me a PM. Thanks.
Back again in several hours.
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haha happens to my dad all the time.
