Just returned from a weeklong vacation to Colorado and wondering how I should title this post. How about "Don't ever fly Northwest Airlines" or "Northwest Airlines totally sucks" or "God, please smite Northwest Airlines"? But then I wouldn't be able to start off the post this way, would I?

I should have known better than to fly using Northwest. After all, this is the same airline that left my wheelchair-bound Grandma in an empty terminal one time. She was flying to my mom's in Alabama and had to make a connection in Memphis. The flight attendants told her to just wait over here and they'll send someone to come to take her to her next flight. So she waited. She waited and waited and the terminal got emptier and emptier and then the main lights went out then a pilot walked by her and asked what she was doing there.

She just barely made her connection.

That was two or three years ago, but the wife managed to find the cheapest tickets for us from New York to Denver -- on Northwest. What the heck, we said, we have no money. Let's go.

Now, to get from our house to LaGuardia Airport isn't all that easy. First, we have to get a ride from our neighbor to the bus stop, take the bus stop to the City, and then catch a shuttle bus to the airport. It's a slight ordeal (going to JFK would be even worse). But besides that, we managed to show up early for the flight. Which was cancelled. Not a major problem, but they had rescheduled us for a flight that would have arrived in Denver around midnight, where we would start our four hour drive to my in-law's house. The eTicket kiosk informed us we'd have to get in line.

My wife got in the first class line (the plebian line held about 70 other inconvenienced travellers) and there she managed to get us tickets on a direct flight on United (which is a nice airline, judging from the few times I've been on that carrier). Nice, good marks for Northwest. Maybe we can forgive the airline for abandoning my frail grandmother in a strange city.

The return flight.

I mentioned earlier that it's a four hour drive to the airport from the in-law's place. We got to the airport a half-hour before the return flight was to leave -- normally I like to get to the airport incredibly early, you know, two or so hours early -- but not this time... We putzed around with the eTicket machine (which ran incredibly slowly) and managed to get all the way to the end of the check-in process when an alert came up. We must speak to a real, live human being. So we went to the real, live human being who informed us that they had just closed check-in for our flight a few minutes ago.

They closed check in a half hour before the flight was scheduled to leave. The eTicket foldy-thing you put your boarding passes in has a sticker that says we should be there no later than 15 minutes. The sign at the bording gate read twenty minutes. Whatever.

Aside from getting us on a later flight (and to a closer airport), the real, live human being was no help. And a bit surly. Our moods probably didn't help.

She said they couldn't send our bags on another flight (which makes me wonder what would happen if my bags were accidentally sent to Sydney -- would I have to fly to Sydney to escort my bags back to the states?). She wouldn't let us take them as carry-on luggage (which was reasonable, although they would have fit in the first class closet-thing, but we're economy class passengers and shouldn't know about such things). She wouldn't even allow us to take our bags to the boarding gate and have the bags be loaded on the plane there (which US Airways let us do one time we were running incredibly late). No, we were two or four minutes late, and we were going to be in Denver International for four more hours.

Riddle me this: Our original flight from our connection to New York was a dinner flight. Our new flight from Denver to our connecting city was a "snack" flight. Both flights left within ten minutes of each other. Both flights were about the same length of time. How did our actual meal get turned into a turkey sandwich?

More fun: The connecting flight left the ground at 10:05pm local time (11:05pm destination time). One would think that there might be people on the plane who are tired. Oh, not so Northwest Airlines. About twenty minutes in the air, the announcement came on the intercom that they'd be showing a short (one minute) commercial for a charity that the airline was aligned with.

The video that instucted everyone how to fasten their seatbelts was prefaced by a commercial for the airline. You already have our money. We're already on your plane. We've been treated poorly by your Denver ground crew. We don't need actors telling us how good your airline is. We know they're lying.

We wound up getting into Newark at 1:35am. The last flight of the night. There were only two cabs and we were third in line. Luckily for us, [1] the people in line before us had their cab voucher incorrect and [2] the cab driver we got lives about seven blocks away from our house.

So we're back and now I have to flip through several posts on the forum.

Ah, air travel.

-Faux "will talk about Continental Airlines one of these days" Pas