Ready to Launch

Finally! Departure day.

I decided, for reasons lost to a few grains of time, to fly out of San Francisco. Originally, I was taking the direct SFO-LIS flight by TAP Portuguese airlines. But that morphed into joining Julie on the return flight from Zurich… which necessitated a change of the outbound flight to United SFO —> Zurich —>Porto.

I planned on walking to the light rail in the historic district (about a half-mile walk), taking it to the Amtrak station at the end of the line, then Amtrak (the Capitol Corridor train) to Richmond, where I’d switch over to the BART train to SFO Airport.

Julie offered to drive me to Amtrak and I took up that offer. We had a nice breakfast and I got to Amtrak in plenty of time. Boarded and set up for the hour-long ride.

The trip down from Sacramento was a bit challenging… the first, likely, of many trip challenges. The train was delayed at the Sacramento station due to a “police action” in Davis on the tracks. The conductor didn’t know how long it would be before we resumed, but thought it might be two hours.

Two hours, of course, was the cushion time I built in to my journey so that I wouldn’t have to hurry. Even two hours late would still afford me a couple hours in the airport, because of course I had planned to arrive two hours before the two hours before the flight. I had a pass for the United Club lounge area, so I wasn’t too worried about that extra time. Honestly, I get more stressed the more variables in motion that might delay or prevent my flight.

As those variables fell into place—the train was delayed only 40 minutes after all—and I arrived at Richmond’s BART station, and then at the SFO Airport terminal, I relaxed and felt the tension slough off. My luggage surprisingly didn’t get any extra charge applied, and so once that was done and I was through TSA security (5 minutes?), all was golden.

I booked a premium economy ticket to take advantage of the extra legroom and bigger seats, as I hoped to get some sleep on the flight. So I settled in, read the last few chapters of The Wind in the Willows as we soared over Canada and Greenland.

« previous	next »