Seven Red

Here are some famous last words, from a previous post: “The Atlanta-Athens-Atlanta-Seattle trip went off without a hitch. I have yet to be really annoyed by the airlines.”

This was, perhaps, the dumbest thing I ever posted. It’s like those people who say something like “Oh, I haven’t been sick in a really long time.” Needless to say, that person will be hit with the flu inside of two weeks after uttering that kind of challenge to the universe. And so it is with the airlines. I really went through about two years of fairly frequent flights without one single problem. Oh, I had very minor twenty minute delays here and there, but I don’t consider that serious enough to even bother with. The volume of horror stories I was hearing from all sides seemed, by comparison, overblown. This is especially true about the sucking pit of O’Hare, which hasn’t given me problem one in eight or so roundtrip flights. On time, on point, luggage there. Great. Not today.

We did our trip to NY today (Albany), and everything was going smoothly. We walked to the corner and caught the bus:

WE even timed it using the trusty CTA bus tracker, as reported. That got us to Stage 2, the Blue Line to O’Hare:

Once again, no problem. The train came, on we got, and to O’Hare. The sucking pit of O’Hare: Stage 3. Our flight was supposed to leave at 1:36. But the flight before us was still sitting there, and it was scheduled for an 11:30 departure. It was at this point 12:45. Ah well, we’ll be delayed. It finally boards at 1:20, and we see that our flight was delayed until 2:05. Score. That ain’t bad. Within five minutes we see a new listing: Albany, Departure: 5:05. Huh? That’s right, five-oh-five, as in four friggin’ hours from now. Not happy:

We finally get on the plane, which has been moved up to 4:30, only to discover that the pilots who were supposed to fly us to Albany are “fatigued” (no doubt a labor action) , so we sit in the hot plane at the gate for an hour, waiting for new pilots to arrive. We arrived at O’Hare at around 11:30, and finally took off around 5:45. The flight to Albany takes less than two hours. Oh well. I’m not really complaining. It wasn’t that bad. We finally got to Albany and made the only stage of  journey that required a private vehicle. Stage 4:

One of the great things about where we live is the transportation infrastructure. Today we will walk about a block to the corner, jump on a public bus, then take the CTA to O’Hare, then take a plane to Albany. Mass transit from door-to-door. OK, not really, since we’ll take a car out to she‘s Mom’s place once we get to Albany, but still. babygirl has been promised train ride AND plane ride, so she’s excited. “First we gotta get way way way up in the sky,” she says.

One very cool feature of the CTA: the CTA bus tracker, a step up from the old bus timetable we used to gripe about in NYC. This engine allows you to better estimate when to go to the bus stop by providing a GPS-based estimated time of arrival for buses that are currently en route. It also maps them on to a Google Map so you can see precisely where they are. It is, of course, the same technology that’s been in cars through the Garman and in planes for quite some time: the trip tracker stuff. But it’s genius to put it in a bus, since the worst thing about mass transit is the waiting, and the lack of information associated with waiting. This technology at least gives you an information stream that makes waiting more predictable. Thumbs up to the CTA.