kitchtrips

It’s a high school prom, it’s a Springsteen song
It’s a ride in a Chevrolet, it’s a man on the moon
And fireflies in June, and kids sellin’ lemonade
It’s cities and farms, it’s open arms
One nation under God
It’s America

It’s a high school prom, it’s a Springsteen song
It’s a ride in a Chevrolet, it’s a man on the moon
And fireflies in June, and kids sellin’ lemonade
It’s cities and farms, it’s open arms
One nation under God
It’s America

– Rodney Atkins

Thursday 18 May, 2023

America! Good to be back.

A decent flight, with maybe 4-5 hours sleep on and off for yours truly over the thirteen hour duration, a relatively smooth (at least compared to the past) trip through customs and border protection at LAX, which remains a stressful event even though I have absolutely nothing to hide. And off to the baggage carousel.

Bags off our United flight slide out onto the carousel. Nathan sees his. Kat sees hers. I…don’t see mine. And there are no bags left. I speak to a United employee who scans my boarding pass and starts to hypothesise that someone has taken my bag – because it’s black, with a red tag, which apparently is a lot of bags – instead of theirs. They check that no one has tried to put it onto a connecting flight. No. Thankfully.

Still, the bag is nowhere to be found. We hung in the terminal for a little while, before the same friendly United guy said I could wander around to Terminal 7, which is the United domestic arrivals/departures, and check there. By the time I got there, he said, there might be an update. But he was insistent – absolutely insistent – that the bag made it to Los Angeles. The thought that someone had picked it up mistakenly and had taken it to another airline in another terminal for a continuing flight had me worried.

Anyway, we get to United Terminal 7, and the lady at the baggage desk scans my luggage receipt, peers at the screen, looks up at me – and tells me that the last time the bag was scanned was in Sydney, and that, somehow, my bag his still there. Which, of course, is totally different to what the United guy in the international terminal said. At least I had an answer. Still, not a fun experience to go through on the back end of a thirteen-hour flight.

A lost baggage case was opened in my name, and once I got a phone, I was able to call a 1800 number for United. The gentleman I spoke to said he would book my bag on the next flight to America from Sydney and – because we are flying to Boise tomorrow – arrange for it to meet me there. I hung up with the information that the bag would go Sydney-San Francisco-Boise on United flights, and arrive in Treasure Valley around the same time as me: Friday at 4:00pm. Talk about a stress reliever. I’d gone from expecting never to see the bag again, to feeling a whole lot better about things.

We did some shopping in Los Angeles at the famous The Grove open-air mall (just needed a change of clothes, with everything I had other than what I was wearing in my suitcase, still sitting in some room in Sydney – then checked into our airport hotel in El Segundo.

Our dinner plans were to drive out to Santa Clarita and meet up with an old friend, Nate, to watch the Lakers game at the Buffalo Wild Wings sports bar out there. Good in theory: maybe an hour door to door. In reality: a bad accident and traffic backed up meant it took us nearly two whole hours – a lot of that time creeping along well below the speed limit – to travel forty miles. Even by LA standards, that was insane.

Just as well the company was good at the other end. Nate is one of my favourite people: he’s a drummer I’ve known for years, back to the Rockstar: INXS days, currently working on The Voice for NBC over here (which is a juggernaut) and the man can tell a story or a joke like it’s nobody’s business. It was nice to be sitting beside him watching a Lakers game rather than the usual, texting back and forth across the ocean. Even though the Lakers didn’t win, it was a high-quality game of playoff basketball, and the atmosphere inside the bar was close to being there…at a small fraction of the price.

The homeward trip took thirty minutes. Just as well, because we were all pretty tired. A solid eight hour sleep coming up, before we head back to the airport – me without any checked luggage – for our Southwest Airlines flight to Boise via Los Angeles. Despite the bag drama, I’m happy to be back.