Day 1 - Friday, July 4

Outbound


Left the house about 12:25. The Super Shuttle had two other stops to make, one at U of H and the other in The Heights. I hadn't slept all that well the night before, so I dozed during the last leg. We met up with Jill after going through security. Check in had taken a while, mainly because we weren't on United for the whole trip, and the kiosk needed assistance from a human person. We headed to the currency exchange booth in Terminal E to convert dollars to kroner. Then we grabbed a bite to eat and headed for the gate. Boarding for the Chicago flight started late, but we pulled out only 9 minutes after 4. We didn't sit together, as Jill and I had both purchased Economy Plus seating. However, her seat (12D) was in the row immediately in front of mine (20C), due to the weird way United numbers their seats. The flight was without incident. I might have napped a little, but mostly read my book. O'Hare is NW of downtown, apparently. We crossed over the south side of the airport heading east, and made a U-turn over lake Michigan to begin our final descent. I thought taxiing took a long time at IAH, but at O'Hare, it seemed like the airport was in Chicago but the runway was in Milwaukee. Although our bags were checked through, we found we would need to go through security again at the International Terminal 5. We also needed to check in at SAS, since neither Jill or I had been given boarding passes. But we also each had a pass to the United Club that would expire later in the year. Seemed like a shame to waste it, so we decided we could afford to spend a little time in the Club before catching the train to the other Terminal. The Club was only a few dozen yards from our arrival gate. Went up and availed ourselves of the free chardonnay and snack mix while we relaxed in comfortable surroundings. A woman at the bar said she'd just gotten off a 747 on a direct flight from Shanghai. Her story made our 7+ hour flight seem much more tolerable.

Caught the train to Terminal 5 as the sun was going down. Check in took a while, again due to the limited intelligence of the United kiosk at IAH. The SAS rep first had to check to make sure our luggage was in the SAS computer system. (It was.) Then he had to check on the status of our upgrade request. We each had emails saying we'd been approved for SAS Plus, "subject to availability" whatever that meant. The other SAS rep came over and announced that the emails didn't mean anything, since they didn't provide seating information. I have to say, the SAS seat selection system is archaic, if not positively medieval. With United, I simply pull up the seat map for whatever flight I'm on, and click on whichever available seat I want, and charge the difference in fare to my credit card. With SAS (as we found out), the people at the gate assign all the seats, and it doesn't matter that we put in for an upgrade back in February.

Traveling on the July 4th holiday seems to have resulted in shorter lines at the airports; security was a breeze, as it had been at Bush. Found our gate, which wasn't staffed yet, and then settled into some seats to await our fate. Turns out, I needn't have worried. Since we were all traveling together with the same last name, we got seated together in the SAS Plus section, aisle-aisle-window, 15F, G, and H. The plane was an Airbus A340, roughly equivalent to a 767, but with 4 engines. We could see fireworks above downtown Chicago from the windows near our gate. Departure was on time. We taxied up to Wisconsin and took off, taking a northeasterly course. I was surprised that SAS offered dinner, seeing that it was nearly 11:00 local time. But we had a choice between ravioli carbonara and Japanese-style chicken meatballs, both served with salad, bread, dessert, and wine. Jill and I had the meatballs, which were fine, but Lauri said the sauce on the ravioli wasn't a carbonara at all, but a tomato-based sauce. Even the economy-class passengers had dinner, so I guess the level of service is higher in general when flying transatlantic. I tried to sleep, and managed to doze here and there. Lauri and Jill checked out the movies on the entertainment system for a while, then slept.

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