dumb and dumber

First of all, my apologies for being blog-quiet the past week or so. I was in NY for a few days last weekend and this weekend has been spent in LA and San Diego.

So here's the dumb and dumber tale...

My flight to leave LA is out of Long Beach at 5pm. My sister A's flight to visit her boyfriend in the bay area is out of LAX at 6pm. We, very intelligently, decide to leave at 3pm to get my Long Beach in time for my flight, so she can turn around, drive to LAX and leave her car in long-term parking.

Well...3:00 turned into 3:30 after various nickel-dicking, and we actually hit the freeway at 3:45 or so. Well, for anyone who has ever been to LA, you can probably guess what happened next. Yes, a traffic jam. (Not that we should be particularly surprised. This is the city, after all, when you get traffic jams at 2am just due to congestion.) Basically, we gave up on the idea of making my flight in Long Beach (still another 45 minutes away even with no traffic), and I just went to LAX with her.

We tried, we really tried to sweet talk Delta into putting me on a flight from LAX to Salt Lake. No such luck (one of the many reasons why Delta is not my favorite airline. United would have done it if there was space. I mean, if the seat's empty, the revenue is lost, so what's the big deal with doing a favor for a customer? I'm sure my brother, the airline industry consultant, has some thoughts about that. Feel free to weigh in P!)

So I took my sister's car keys, while she went through security to catch her flight. The plan was for me to spend the night at her apartment, catch an am flight home from LAX (for $90), and leave her car in long-term parking for her to pick up when she gets back in a few days.

OK, so the "dumb" part was us a) not checking on traffic, and b) leaving completely insufficient time to get to the airport. The "dumber" part was when A left me her car keys, but went through security without giving me her house keys. Thankfully, she realized it before she got to her gate and had plenty of time to come back through security to give me the keys.