This one is going to be about us actually flying this time around, and not the vacation itself. This time around we had way too much happen to us and the damn planes that we had to take.

First flight from JFK to Denver went without a single hitch. We were flying JetBlue. All the people working for the company were very pleasant, the flight took off on time, and landed on time.

However our second flight was where it all started. We were going from Denver to Las Vegas and we booked a flight on Frontier Airlines. Our pilot greeted everyone with the following words: “Welcome to the lucky flight 777 going from Denver to Las Vegas.” The plane started moving 5 minutes before the scheduled flight, so we were all pretty happy that we’d get to Las Vegas fairly early. That’s pretty much were the good things ended.

After moving for 30 or so seconds the plane stopped. We thought nothing of it yet. 15 minutes later the pilot informed us that they were unable to test some system so they had to wait for the maintenance crew to come over. After waiting some more we were informed that everything was great and they they were going to run a test again. The test failed again. The plane was moved back to the docking port and the maintenance crew was called in yet again. After everything was “fixed” the test failed again! This kept going on for a bit more then an hour at which point everyone started getting pretty upset. After some more testing the pilot informed us that we’re going to switch planes! That’s something that we haven’t gone through before. They had to bring out a replacement plane, and then board everyone by checking all the boarding passes by hand. You can imagine how quickly that moved. By the way, the raw that we were sitting at was number 17.

After all of that we’ve ended up in Las Vegas. Very much late, but we did get there. Eldar mentioned that we do not want to have anything to do with 7s anymore on this trip. This is about the time when we got the taxi wait line. “Car number 7″, said a guy distributing people at the line. We had a good laugh.

At the hotel (HGVC at Flamingo) we were told that they have a great room for us, 1047, but it would be ready in 15 minutes. In 15 minutes we were informed the room was going to be ready in an hour, but they have a nice one available for us: 327. So we figured that we should wait and agreed. When we go to the room, all the windows were overlooking an ugly roof with a lot of ventilation pipes sticking out and nothing more. We went back and asked for 1047, which ended up being a nice room after all.

But all that is nothing compared to today. We quickly check out of the hotel and got into a cab. Mid way to the airport I noticed that the cab number was 327. Funny, we thought. In the airport we went through the check in, and were in front of our gate well ahead of the departure time. Since we didn’t eat any breakfast we decided to go to a near-by Burger King and grab something. At about 15 minutes to departure we were done eating and started walking back to our gate.

You can imagine how much we were pissed when we saw the doors locked and the walk-way to plane moving away. They decided to depart earlier, even though there were check-in people not on the plane yet and 15 more minutes to go!! Hence the last time we’re doing any kind of business with American West (or US Airways that AW merged with). So they moved us to a flight to Phoenix, which should’ve connected us to JFK. Interestingly enough that flight got canceled all together. Then we were put on stand by to another Phoenix flight. However there were no empty seats for us! So they moved us to a JFK flight which is 5 hours later then our original one! All because those @#$%s decided to take off early! Anyhow, we’re sitting in an air port right now, waiting for our flight. We have a long flight ahead of us (hopefully) and our baggage is gone on the first plane, on its way to NYC. It better still be there when we get there.

Oh, and by the way. Our flight number was 22 and we were sitting in row 22. Then Phoenix flights were going from gate 11 and 14. The one that we’re waiting for now is at 17. The seating assignments given to us was row 7, which we did exchange for another row since they were not placed together.

What’s next?

This concludes my lengthy rant about American West. If there are alternatives to the flights that we will be taking in the future American West will not be our choice. Wish us luck, we want to get home!