This blog is to maintain an account of my travel experiences, whether it is business or pleasure.. there are things I wish to remember.. when I'm old and am not sure whether I will travel as much!

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

reLAX

This is the first "trip" for which I am taking off from the Bay Area. So, I've got Rathish to keep me company through the loooooong overnight stay in LA International airport. We had to camp there for 8 hours in the night in exchange for a ticket that cost us 150 dollars lesser! Considering that it was two of us, 300 was worth saving.... or maybe not....

Rathish came promptly to pick me up at Hickorynut Ct, where we were bid farewell saying: "Enjoy the party and do eat lot of payaasam". I think she meant some wine ;-) We parked the car at Park SFO and reached the terminal some 45 minutes before the departure time. Rathish was then held by TSA personnel, who demanded an explanation on what was inside his Tripod stand. After reassuring themselves by scanning the tripod alone, we were free to board the airplane.

We decided to grab a quick dinner "to fly". But since the co-passengers were taking their own time, both of us finished our dinner before departure even as the flight attendents were making their announcements. We joked about asking them kostins with food in our mouth and we crunching the pizza.

We reached Los Angeles promptly at 10:20pm. Another 8 hours to go! We were quite depressed by the crowd in the terminal, which meant we could not sleep peacefully for a while atleast. We were just sitting there dazed and wondering when people would get out! Since it did not seem like anytime soon, we started wandering around the terminal, looking for some "interesting" spots. Soon we found some escalators and got reminded of how we spent time going against the tide on the escalators in Hong Kong, where we both had to wait a long time, enroute to Chennai. So, this time, Rathish suggested a different game, we both had a race to see who would reach the end first.

We took up our positions, one on each escalator. The rules, no running... just go with the tide. Simple enough? Guess what??? It was a neck to neck finish and the game ended in a TIE!!!!! Our hopes of continuing this game were dashed because there were no more escalators; only an EXIT from the terminal. So we lazily found our way back to where we first landed.

After tracking a few more departures and arrivals, we finally felt that the terminal was empty enough to catch some sleep. But we were WRONG!!! There was a demanding "Your Attention please.... WELCOME to LOS ANGELES" ringing through our ears every 10 minutes. What a way to capture attention of 10s of people in the terminal! We found a corner in the gate area and settled down, much like people waiting in the Mumbai Sahar International airport would. Soon we were struck by a latti and asked to leave the gate area for "security purposes" and re-enter only at 4:30am. What a dream shattering experience! Then we sleep-walked through the doorway, trying to find our next bed. The nominees were: 1) C/O Platform 2) Conveyer Carousel 3) LA floor 4) AA Baggage service

We kind of found a middle ground between options 1 & 2. I'll post a picture of that experience soon! It was pretty memorable and "down to earth" ;-) What followed was a intermittent sleep and soon it was time to get back to the gate. We caught the flight to Denver without much more incident and caught some quality sleep on the way. Soon, it was time to land and let the fun begin!

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