Part 1: This should be the easy part.
Whoever said, “getting there is half the fun”, clearly never
had to fly Spirit Airlines at 5:30 in the morning to get wherever they were
going.
The good news was, both alarms I set for 2:30 a.m. went off
and I actually managed to roll out of the house by 3:00. Things went slightly downhill from there.
First I had to get my luggage in the car. Not a big deal, really, but I had to shove a
few things over in the back of my Rav4, in the dark, for the big suitcase. In doing so I discovered that I hadn’t
cleared out all the glass shards from when my rear window imploded a few months
ago. So at 3:05ish in the morning, I’m
standing there in the street with a bloody finger. Not gushing or anything, but really? It’s 3:05 on Sunday morning as I’m leaving
for a big trip and I manage to damage myself doing something as mundane as
packing the baggage. The good news is: I
packed Band-aids. The bad news is,
they’re in the suitcase I just shoved into the car. I ended up having to wait until I had parked
the car at the garage to get one out.
So I get to the place I’m parking my car and they take me to
the airport where I’m shuffled into a line to print my boarding pass. This is where Spirit starts to show how much
they truly suck.
I login using just my name (not a lot of security there – I
guess they depend on TSA to make sure that the boarding pass and the ID match?)
and they ask me 95 times if I want to pay $60 to sit in a bigger chair. No, really, that was all it was. It wasn’t a real ‘first class’, it was just a
bigger chair. Pass. All 95 times.
Then they want to know if I have luggage. Only they really, really don’t make it clear
what they’re asking. So when it says
“how many carry-ons do you have?” I hit one.
It wanted to charge me $50 for THAT.
Yes, seriously, Spirit charges you to use the overhead bins. Fortunately the Spirit employee working the
lines noticed that I was counting my camera backpack as a carry-on and
over-rode it to $0 since it can go under my seat.
Then it asks about checked bags. Yes, I have one. HOWEVER, I’m fairly confident that I paid for
it when I booked the ticket, since I was sure I’d need luggage for this trip. That’s not showing up anywhere on the screen
and there’s nowhere to enter something like a prepaid code or anything. So I check my confirmation email and I don’t
see anything on there about it. Fine. I tell it I have one bag. The line attendant has me put my one bag on
the scale. 49.5 pounds. For not actually weighing it, I’m all kinds
of pleased that I got it in under 50.
I’m told it’s $25 for it being over-weight. Can I get it under 43? Uh. No.
My backpack is full to bursting as it is. Seriously?
Only 40 lbs are allowed before you get smacked with yet another
fee? Really?
So I slide my card to pay the damn fees and it asks me to
enter my ‘personal identification code’ for my card. Now, this being my debit card, I assume it
wants my pin and enter that. Only AFTER
I do that, does it flash up the thing that says it wants the code number from
the back of the card. So now it doesn’t
go through and instead of simply saying, “That didn’t work, try again.” It
LOCKS ME OUT! I try to start the process
over and it says, “You can’t check in, because you owe fees.” And logs me out again. So now I have to go back to the attendant
person.
REALLY???? This is your idea of
convenience? I need to check my card
carefully when I get online again. I
have a feeling I got slammed with a talk-to-a-real-person fee in there
somewhere.
But I’m finally waved through and I drop my bag off at the
big x-ray machines and head for the TSA.
Then I get through security (actually faster than Midway)
and head off for my gate. Only there are
no signs indicating which way Spirit is so I walk down the ‘road more traveled’
and discovered that I need to not only go back with way I came, but down to the
very butt-end of the concourse. I get
down there in time to hear an announcement about how OMG you better sit in YOUR
seat! You have an assigned seat and you
BETTER sit in it even if another one looks more comfortable or whatever, you
must sit in YOUR SEAT!!!
And we’re planning to leave 10 minutes early. Now, I’m all for getting where I’m going, but
I need breakfast. So I sprint back down
the corridor for McDonald’s and get a sandwich and orange juice. Only it took them like 8 minutes to give me
my orange juice. Even though there were
like 10 glasses premade and sitting on the line. This kid who ordered two after me got his
orange juice with his food, but I was left standing there while they refilled
the machine, even though I was going, “Why can’t I have my drink?”
So I get finally get my o.j. and sprint back down to the
gate.
They load people needing assistance and then the people who
have paid to put a change of underwear in their precious overhead bins. Then I’m in the next group.
I get down the aisle and find… someone in my seat.
I try to tell her she’s in my seat but it’s this 90 year old
little woman who apparently only speaks Russian (possibly Polish) has seriously
set up camp with her breakfast and … whatever.
This is not helped by the fact that the person in the middle seat is
already there and is either still drunk from last night or at the least very,
very hungover and also not looking to get up so I can get in.
But, OMG YOU MUST SIT IN YOUR SEAT announcements. So I try to explain to this woman that she’s
in my seat. It looked like one of those
scenes from every bad comedy movie where you need the cooperation of someone
who doesn’t speak the language of the main characters. They can only say, “I don’t speak English”
and “thank you”. And they use those two
phrases over and over again even when neither makes any kind of sensible answer
to the question being asked.
Fine, screw it. I sit
in the aisle seat.
So much for putting my sweatshirt against the window and
sleeping all the way to Florida.
To give you an idea how cheap this airline is, their
seatback pockets are half the size of a Southwest seatback. I can’t get my crochet bag and my bag of
gummy bears in there at the same time it’s so small. On Southwest, I can get both of those and my
laptop in there.
There are no free drinks on this flight.
Not even coffee. W.T.F. 5:30 a.m. flight that leaves early and I
can’t even get a cup of bad coffee without being nickel and dimed to death. And there’s no drink menu in the
seatback. You have to ask the attendant
as he comes through with the credit card machine. So you don’t even know what
you’re getting yourself into when you ask for a drink. Oy.
I can’t wait to see what’s waiting for me as I try to
transfer to my flight from Florida to San Jose.
ETA: The truly special kind of cheap. Instead of actually having an air freshener
in the bathroom, there’s a filter bag of coffee hanging off the coat hook. No wonder they want to charge Starbucks
prices for cheap-ass coffee.
Part 2: What chimpanzee actually thought this plan
up?
Well that was the stupidest transfer ever. Anyone ever have to fly through Fort
Lauderdale before? Have to make a
transfer from an H gate to an F gate? If
you have, you know where this is going.
If not, and you have a choice, spare yourself this fate.
We land in Florida and I have on my second boarding pass
(and only on my second boarding pass, not on any signage near where I’m
deplaning) that my new gate is F2. We
deplane at something like H10. I walk
all the way down to the end of the H concourse.
I see gates for places like San Juan, Colombia and Guatemala. I figure my flight has to be going from
somewhere around here. I go to the other
end. I check the departure boards. Nothing anywhere says F gates. There are no flights to San Jose on the
boards. WTF?
I finally see a sign that says “Baggage claim, long term
parking and F Gates.” But that doesn’t
make any sense. You have to leave the
secure area to get to Baggage and Parking.
You shouldn’t be leaving the secure area to get to another gate, right?
Uh… no. With absolute
minimal signage and asking about six people I finally find out that the F gates
are in ANOTHER BUILDING. And there’s no
tram or shuttle or anything. You have to
exit the H building, walk all the way around the traffic pick-up circle where
you can’t even see the signs indicating F gates until you’re almost there. Then you have to go in, go up and GO THROUGH
TSA AGAIN! Now bear in mind, I had,
according to my boarding pass 31 minutes to figure this out, get there and get
through both the ID and the search-and scan-part of security. Did I mention that I thought it made more
sense to wear my hiking boots than to have them taking up half my
suitcase? Not the best plan ever.
So I the TSA guy, for some reason, has a problem getting the
counterproof detector to accept my passport, then I go into the scan machine,
where my hair gets flagged.
Seriously. I can only figure that
for some reason the thingy didn’t like the knot in my ponytail elastic. So the officer searched my hair for
contraband. (The small scissors in my crochet kit was fine, but you know, my
deadly purple elastic not so much.)
Anyway, I finally get through get repacked and get to my
gate. I found a coffee spot and got a
café con leche and some water and went and sat at my gate.
When they started boarding us, it went really, really,
really slowly. I couldn’t figure out why
until I got up there (and I was towards the end of the line) and discovered
that they were reassigning about half the people’s seats.
So they ask me if I would mind being moved closer to the
front of the plane. I had an aisle seat,
and would have preferred a window seat, so I figured it couldn’t be worse as
long as I wasn’t in the middle. The gate
attendant promised me it would be aisle or window, so I asked for window and
they moved me to 14F.
I get on the plane and guess what… THERE’S A LITTLE OLD
NON-ENGLISH SPEAKING LADY IN MY SEAT!
Really universe?
Really????
[Hm…. I think we’re somewhere over Mexico. We’ve gone out over the Atlantic, but now
we’re over land again. Looks like farms.]
So her daughter tells me that the flight attendant had moved
their whole family to be together and I could have the window seat a row up and
across. I said, I didn’t mind if the
flight crew didn’t. Then I realized it
was the exit row with a LOT more space (and at the time no one else in the
row), so I was completely okay with it.
Then, of course, the person with that actual seat number
came on and wanted her seat. So she gets
the flight attendant and says she wants her assigned seat. So I said I’d be happy to move… if I got my assigned seat back.
Turned out in the long run that the other exit, window seat
was open so that girl moved there and I stayed here. Eventually someone else sat in the aisle seat
of this row, but there’s no one between us, which is nice because I can turn my
back to the wall and put my feet up on the extra seat to type. Which is necessary since there’s a whole lot
of legroom in this row, but the tray tables don’t stretch any further than
normal, so my computer is about two feet in front of me when I put it on the
tray.
I’m about two hours out of San Jose now. I’m getting a little excited. J
And now we have to do immigration paperwork and such. Honest to God, they just announced, “We do
not provide pens for your paperwork. If
you do not have one, please look to your neighbors to see if they have one you
can borrow.”
Cheapest. Airline. Ever.
Flight NK755
Customs form (blue)
Immigration (white)
Okay these forms are, as my students would put it, a hot
mess. I totally understand doing them in
Spanish first, but if you’re going to put the English under it, you might want
it to be English that English-speakers can understand.
·
Nationality is spelled wrong. Seriously.
On a customs form.
·
Do you bring chemical agents, pharmaceutical
substances or remainders, arms aunmunition [no joke, that’s how it’s spelled]
or explosives.
·
Do you bring with yourself more than US$10,000
or it equivalent one in other currencies, cash financial littles values. Or
other financial instruments. [Apparently whoever translated this doesn’t
believe in question marks. There isn’t
one on this whole form.]
·
Have you enjoyed in the last 6 months
exoneration tributes. [No one on this
plane can even tell me what the this means.
Other than ‘if you don’t know what it means, the answer is ‘no’.]
SERIOUSLY???? And the
flight attendants seem all surprised that half the passengers are going, “WTF
is this even???” Like this form is brand
new or something. How have a million
other Americans not said, “You all do get that this form is a disaster, right?”
On a happier note, the clouds up here are amazing. They look like you could walk on them.
And lest anyone think I wasted a whole day in Costa Rica without seeing any animals...
I chased birds around our hotel parking lot for about half an hour. There will be more pics when there's more time (Parrots! Wild Parrots! FLOCKS of them!) But for now, my first 'you won't find that in Chicago. Ever.' animal...
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| White Winged Dove [004-2013] |
It's a White Winged Dove. It's coo sounds almost like an owl hooting. And I love that blue ring around his eye!
Okay, tomorrow we have the active volcano (we're getting up early to try to beat the clouds) and the coffee farm. Very exciting!
So here's another reason having a point-and-shoot can be a good idea: casual photographers can use it. I've had more than a few people either hesitate to shoot for me with the SLR and a few more that do so, but do it really badly because they aren't sure what everything does (like, hey, this wheel thing on the end of the lens turns! So now it's out of focus) so the shots don't come out. Here's me on the Poás Volcano. I have my SLR over my shoulder, so obviously a friend from the trip shot this for me with my pocket camera. There's one of the other mountain ranges behind me (sorry, can't remember which one) and the central valley, with San Jose, between us. 
When, you know... it doesn't look like this. This is up on the Poás Volcano... I think. We were up a good bit, so I'm pretty sure that's where we were. And once again, we were reminded that we were in the RAIN forest. Which means clouds. And once you get up high enough, you literally have your head (and feet and arms and the rest of you...) in the clouds!
