Safely ensconced for the summer in Cambridge, Ontario, I began to prepare for a two week return visit to Palm Springs.
Positive travel karma was with me that day. I sailed through Customs and security as swiftly as if I were carrying a diplomatic passport. I even scored an aisle seat in the only empty row of seats on an otherwise full flight from Toronto to LA.
My only problem that morning was leaving Cambridge without my trusty, smooth-scalp protecting baseball cap; an essential piece of outerwear for any Captain Picard wannabe visiting the desert southwest.
With time to kill I hit a few shops and picked out a fashionable black cap adorned with a big red maple leaf.
While in the gift shop I noticed that most prominent symbol of Canadian tourism, a leaf shaped glass bottle of pure dark amber maple syrup. My former partner in life of twenty years would be joining me in Palm Springs to see me safely to and from my pending colonoscopy, the primary reason for my trip, and I thought the bottle and its contents would make a nice thank you gift.
I paid for a new cap and a bottle of Canada’s finest breakfast beverage. Given the amount of it consumed up here you can be forgiven for thinking it’s a beverage. After conversion the cost of the bottle of syrup was roughly $8.50 US.
As my flight began its decent into Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) I came to the stark realization I would be arriving at Terminal 2 and my connecting United Express flight for Palm Springs would depart from Terminal 8.
I now had a problem.
Los Angeles being the motor vehicle capital of the world, it should come as no surprise that the only way to travel between LAX terminals is by fume-spewing bus.
Despite having purchased it in a secure facility I was about to leave one secure terminal, travel around LAX’s warren of terminals, and then attempt to enter another secure terminal with a potentially deadly 7.2 oz bottle of pure Canadian maple syrup.
I had two choices, either surrender the syrup and watch it be dropped in a barrel with dozens of other potentially lethal liquids, which would sit amidst hundreds of travelers for hours, or pay the twenty bucks and check the carry-on bag it was stowed in.
John and I have a long history together and in as much as he was about to do me a great favor I decided to bite the bullet and check the bag.
Los Angeles being the motor vehicle capital of the world, it should come as no surprise that the only way to travel between LAX terminals is by fume-spewing bus.
Once you walk out of one terminal, you navigate a series of islands separating civilian traffic from the hoards of shuttle craft servicing the airport. Once at the appropriate boarding location, you have to hope the first two or three circling terminal shuttles, as it was in my case, aren’t already at capacity.
Terminal 8 is an off shoot of Terminal 7 so they share facilities. I disembarked from the shuttle and made my way into the ground level of Terminal 7.
I’ve been flying in and out of LAX since the late 70s. During that time it has been in a near constant state of “modernization” and it hasn’t made it there yet. The lower level of Terminal 7 was dimly lit, walls and ceilings stripped bare with scaffolding restricting everyone’s movement.
Did I mention that there was no air conditioning and that this was an uncharacteristically humid day in Los Angeles?
Upstairs on the ticketing and departures level remodeling was complete but there was still no air conditioning.
To check a bag on a flight I was already checked through on meant that I would need to be ticketed a second time. This meant checking my dangerously excessive volume of maple syrup, voiding my original check-in, and securing a new boarding pass.
As luck would have it this was day three of United Airlines initiating an all new check-in and ticketing system.
Where once you would find an endless, meandering queue of baggage shuffling travelers, there were now banks of gleaming computerized kiosks each with its own mini queue of dazed and confused travelers attended by equally befuddled UA agents. Behind all this technological wonder was the traditional check-in counter fully staffed by about a dozen UA agents, only two of whom were assisting customers.
I attempted to explain my situation to a ticketing agent behind the counter. She would have none of it.
“You have to go out there,” she said motioning me toward the sea of confusion. “I can’t help you.”
I stood helplessly by listening as one of the floor agents tried in vain to assist a young couple from Seattle return home. After five minutes of neither the couple or the United Airlines agent being able to get the system to issue boarding passes, the agent gave up and walked them to the ticketing counter I’d just been shooed away from.
She returned a few moments later and proceeded to try and assist me by having me redo everything I’d just tried to do on the computerized check-in system, which kept telling me what I already knew; I was checked in, I had a boarding pass, I could just proceed to my gate.
What neither the UA agent or I could do was to make the machine understand that I wanted to check a bag that I had previously been checked as a carry-on.
Fifteen minutes later, with the assistance of two more UA agents, and after paying a $20 checked bag fee—neither the kiosk nor the agents had any trouble taking my money—my bag with the lethal $28.50 syrup bottle had been issued a baggage tag and I had a new boarding pass.
“Where do I go now,” I asked the agent who’d finally been able to get the kiosk to provide me with the proper paperwork.
“Up those stairs and through security to gate 82,” she said politely.
I was still carrying my now checked bag but didn’t think anything about it. Many airports have checked bag screening stations separate and apart from ticketing.
On the mezzanine level it soon became apparent someone had forgotten the newly “modernized” Terminal 7 required a security checkpoint necessitating that the one for half the Terminal 7 gates and all of the Terminal 8 gates be shoehorned into what was once a skybridge entrance from a long gone parking structure.
At the top of the escalator to the upper terminal I was greeted by a smiling UA agent with a lilting voice. “Premier member,” she asked as she gestured welcomingly to a line of three passengers sipping complimentary bottles of water.
“No,” I answered. Instantly the smile dropped from her face.
“Over there please,” she said in a flat monotone, her welcoming gesture collapsing into a pointed finger.
I exited the terminal via the open air skybridge-to-nowhere and took my place somewhere around 40th in line high above the multitude of exhaust spewing vehicles below.
As I approached the head of the line to await my turn to enter the security queue I couldn’t help but notice there didn’t seem to be anywhere to drop off my checked bag. This was confirmed by a UA agent who told me checked bags are dropped off at the ticketing counter I’d just come from.
I was a bit upset and extremely frustrated by this time.
The young lady assured me all I had to do was go back downstairs, drop off the bag, and she would return me to my place at the front of the line waiting to enter the screening area.
I did as instructed and headed back upstairs, not, however, before sharing a few choice words with the highest ranking UA official I could find.
Once again at the top of the escalator, the young woman who’d told me she would let me reenter the front of the line to the screening area was nowhere to be seen and her replacement didn’t seem to find my story all that credible. There were now nearly 60 people in line on the skybridge-to-nowhere.
Fortunately a portly security guard had witnessed my encounter with the now departed UA agent and assured her replacement I was telling the truth.
Tired and worn out by the struggle to navigate LAX, the humidity, Terminal 7’s lack of air conditioning, and the complete incompetence of United Airlines, I spent my remaining hour waiting for my connecting flight in the terminal bar where after several glasses of wine the final total for the cost of my souvenir bottle of pure Canadian, dark amber, maple syrup came to $58.50.
I spent my remaining hour waiting for my connecting flight in the terminal bar…
