After managing to wake myself up at 5am I sat in my car in Culver City and waited for my coworker to pick me up en route to LAX for our flight to Portland. He called and said he was coming from the office – so I might as well park at the airport.
He was at the office because when I had talked to him the day before I had mentioned that I forgot to print out our flight information. This would become very important the next morning, as he couldn’t find our flight information either.
I tried to check in at the SouthWest terminal, but the machine was acting funky – so I started to stand in the information line. At this point we were 90 minutes from take-off. After waiting in line more I realized that weeks ago I had been debating with another coworker about what seats she had given us when the tickets were purchased. Why was this important? -Southwest doesn’t use assigned seating.
We checked the flight boards to find any other flight around 7:30am to Portland. It was a US Air flight. That created just one problem. The time was 6:20 and our terminal was on the opposite side of LAX. We knew what had to be done – and sprinted across traffic and parking lots until we got to our destination. Unfortunately the attendant at check-in informed us that because we were one minute too late we could not board the flight (which wasn’t leaving for another 44 minutes). We were informed that only other flight to Portland for the next several hours was a 10:30 flight on Alaskan. So, we went back across LAX to the Alaska terminal.
Through my coworkers refined optimism and persuasiveness we were able to convince the Alaskan attendant to buy our US Airways tickets at face value, saving $500. That left us with over three hours to kill – so we had a large breakfast of Omelettes at the Daily Grill (neither of us had eaten breakfast before our early morning sprints).
The first thing I noticed from the air was how green Oregon’s landscape is; a dense forest of green, quite beautiful even for someone raised in Ohio. For our meeting we crossed over the Columbia River into Camas Washington; we were told that on a good day we could see Mount St. Helens in the distance. Unfortunately it was a rather rainy day, but we were told that wasn’t unusual either.
When we touched down at LAX later we realized that we’d gone to separate parking garages. My coworker had recommended Wallypark but I had ended up at The Parking Spot. I wasn’t sure where the bus was going to stop so I ended up running to catch it after it went past. My only view of my surroundings once inside was the road directly in front of the bus. When I got off the bus it became quickly apparent that The Parking Spot had more than one location – and my car wasn’t at this one. In the throes of embarrassment I had to call my coworker and ask him to drive to the opposite side of LAX and pick me up and bring me right back to where he was starting from (Wallypark was right next to the Parking Spot I was supposed to go to).
