Some Travel Notes

On this trip back up to UW, I flew on frequent flyer miles (net cost: $40.59), to the small local airport. There is a flight that runs several times a day from that airport to Detroit (DTW), so my flight was BOS-DTW-YKF. There are several nice reasons to use this airport. First, on the US-to-Canada leg, you clear customs at the YKF (small airport) end, so there's a grand lineup of.. well, 20 people, tops. It usually goes pretty fast, and it's not that stressful. It just seems like the Toronto customs folks are seriously ornery, while the ones at this smaller airport aren't as vicious. Second, it's only a 20 minute ride from town, so it's not much of an imposition to get a ride from friends or colleagues (compared to YYZ, over an hour away). Third, checking in is a total breeze--you could literally show up 15 minutes before the flight and still make it--it appears there's only one flight at a time there. It is also fun to land at this small airport, where the ground-based navigational aids are sitting next to farmer's silos.

Of course, on the downside, it means that every flight out of here will be a connection. If you can fly direct via YYZ, this small airport is a lose. But if you're connecting anyway, it doesn't matter that much. It seems like it is often not price competitive--there's enough competition out of a big airport like Toronto that prices are driven down, but YKF is a one-airline shop. Also, on the Canada-to-US leg, you clear customs at the DTW connection. This usually works out well (finished in 10 minutes on this last trip). But I've also seen the cavernous waiting gallery filled with passengers, when multiple overseas 747s must have offloaded. The only way I made my connection that they expedited our flight past everyone else.

I'm hoping I'll make it up here reasonably often... but I'm not sure if that will be the case when I am done with school.

As a second travel note: sometimes being short is really useful: I'm standing up here, underneath the overhead bins (on an A320, I think). Even on stupid seat pitch airlines, I am not actually bumping my knees against the seat in front of me.


One of the few savings graces, I suppose.

Third note: I probably heard one of the better excuses for a delay in pushing back on my flight home--they were waiting for a human organ transplant to make it on the plane. Only was about 10 minutes of delay; not a big deal.