Bound for New York

Day 1 – Wednesday May 20th

The Flight to New York

Driving to the airport, the music I could hear in my head was the music from the film Miller’s Crossing, more precisely, the opening credits.  A little strange, since we were humming down the 105 freeway in the car-pool lane through Los Angeles and it’s massive, monumental freeway overpasses.  Through the window my wife was pointing out the airplanes landing in parallel to the freeway as we got closer to the airport to our 22-month-old son. He gazed out the car window awe-struck.  He had never flown in an airplane, but he knew what an airplane was as he would be sure to point them out to us at our house when the airplanes would fly 6,000+ feet above our neighborhood.

LAX - Terminal 5

I need to emphasize, this was the first time for our son to fly.  This had been a worry to me for over a year, as we knew we would be flying to New York in May for my wife’s best-friend’s wedding.  To overcome the unknown is to be as prepared as possible for it.  Months before the trip I jumped on Amazon.com and bought a couple of books, Rough Guide’s Travel with Babies and Young Children and Travels with Baby. Both books were highly recommended and served me well.  The repeating theme throughout both books: “Be Prepared.”

Luggage Check-in

Months earlier I was put in charge of booking the flight for my wife, son and myself.  We normally we fly Jet Blue out of the Long Beach Airport but since the economy has been in the toilet I thought I’d look around for cheaper fare.  I scoured the Internet for a “red-eye” and found the best price from Delta, about a combined $50 cheaper. The only bad part about it was that we’d have to fly out of LAX instead of Long Beach.  Our flight bound for New York’s JFK airport was scheduled at 9:15pm, Wednesday evening.

Being Prepared

By being “prepared” we were at Los Angeles International Airport ready to check in our luggage by 5:30pm.  This was when I found out why Delta was cheaper.  My wife and I each had two pieces of luggage to check in.  Delta charges, per ticket, an extra $15 for the first and another $25 for the second for a combined $40 for two checked-in luggage, each way.  Walking away from the check-in counter and wheeling our luggage over to the TSA’s security X-Ray machines, I found my wallet an $80 lighter; “Hey Delta, thanks for the heads up!”  It is on their website but they do a great job hiding it.  Not technically a bait and switch but pretty damn close.

After watching out our checked-in bags go through we headed up to the security walk-though.  Luckily we were the only ones in line so we were able to take our time practically disrobing and unpacking the carry-on bags for the x-ray machine.  Throughout all this Skyler did great.  He was just watching everything happening and helped in the best way he could, by just going along for the ride.

Dinner in Terminal 5

6:00pm in Terminal 5.  Our flight – 9:15pm.  I think we were a little early, but it gave us time to run Skyler around and tire him out for the overnight flight to New York.  We had dinner at California Pizza Kitchen before we boarded and took some funny pictures.  Skyler is starting to really ham it up in front of the camera.  This is his big smile face, oh yeah and my wife’s big smile too.

Like Mother like Son

As the boarding time approached we assumed they would make an announcement for pre-boarding for passengers with small children.  I’ve always heard Jet Blue announce it, why should it be different.  Oh yeah, because Delta sucks.  The pre-boarding announcement never came and we were left fending off line jumpers.

Mental notes: Delta had already hit Strike three!  The first strike was the bull crap about paying for check-in luggage.  2nd strike: Overbooked! 3rd strike: No pre-boarding for children.  I’ll never fly Delta airlines; not if I can help it.

There are 5 so called zones into which Delta has the airplane divided.  Zone 1 is business class, with Zone 2 through 5 are for the peasants.  We were in Zone 4 that meant we had 3.5 zones to squeeze through to get to our micro-seats.

The Flight

Once we were seated and somewhat settled in for the 5 hour flight things worked out fine.  Skye sat by the window, I sat in the middle seat, Skyler, on our lap.  His travel was free because he was under two years old, however, a word of advice, if you can afford the extra ticket for your toddler, go for it.  It is well worth the price, moderately speaking.  Luckily a very nice lady who was a preschool aide took the aisle seat.  She may have talked a lot but it was fine, she didn’t complain about have to be sat next to a toddler.

One amazing thing that we noticed was when we stepped on board, Skyler automatically realized we were inside an airplane.  He is just barely starting to talk and he mimics us so his word for airplane is a combination of pointing to the sky as if following an airplane with his finger and then he makes the sound of an airplane.

On the Airplane

We got to our seats and Skyler pointed up and made and airplane sound, he knew we would be flying up in the sky.  While we taxied and took off, Skyler just looked out the window with a look of excitement.  It was really quite cool.  After about an hour he fell asleep, Skye fell asleep, and I fell asleep…right before we landed.

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