2022 Todos Santos - Day #5

A long day of travel misadventures...

We pulled away from the Wallen's house in Todos Santos at 9:15 am. Although again longer than I expected (an hour and twenty-five minutes?), it was an easy uneventful drive to the airport. We dropped the rental car at Hertz and caught a shuttle to the international terminal.

At this point, the fun started. The terminal was a sea of people. We got into a line specifically to check in for our Southwest flight. It took more than 45 minutes to work our way through a fairly short line. When we got to the front of line, they issued paper handwritten boarding passes and hand written luggage tags for Phoenix. I had paid for Business Select. The Southwest app showed that we should have had A5 and A6.

We worked our way through a fairly short security line and headed to the gate hand written on the paper boarding pass. It was bedlam. There was no Southwest representative anywhere. Wandering around, I found one person with a Southwest uniform who pointed me back to the gate that was written on the boarding pass.

Our Southwest flight ended being about an hour and a half late. Eventually with someone yelling and pointing, they lined everyone up in the order of the number hand written on the paper boarding pass. Of course, they then moved the whole line to a different gate and loaded us on to buses to get to the plane. I don't remember anyone ever looking at the boarding pass.

It turned out that the computers for most of the airport were down. Just as we were boarding the bus, we started to see some of the digital signage start to come back up.

In spite of all the bedlam, we somehow ended up in the nice exit row!

Landing in Phoenix, we went through passport control and grabbed our luggage. Due to the fact that they hadn't checked the bag through to Sacramento in Mexico, we had to leave security and go down to the ticketing desk. We ended up with a rude agent that initially refused to check our bags. Another agent came over the top and pointed out that we were on the ill-fated Cabo flight.

Racing back through security, we got to the gate just as they were starting to load the Bs. I frankly didn't think that we would make the connection. Again, I had paid for Business Select and was supposed to have boarding passes A9 and A10...

We did end up with row to ourselves. Sharon took the window, while I had the aisle.

We were back in Sacramento just before 7 pm. Unforunately, our luggage didn't make the flight. Sharon and a large number of other people from the flight got in a line to talk to Southwest baggage services. Our luggage was scheduled to show up on a Phoenix flight at 12:30 am. We will have to go back on Tuesday and get the bags.

By the time, we got home it was after 8:30 pm. We had been on the move for more than twelve hours.

Sharon says that she is done with Southwest.

In the more twenty-five years that Sharon and I have traveled together, we have one rule: any day that you end up where you were supposed to be is a good day.