Monterey Chronicles - Intro, Departure Flight

Yeah, there's a reason why I haven't been posting over the last several days. Let's just say that the days immediately prior to a vacation tend to be a little... chaotic. And the first few days of a vacation are rarely any better. First comes the packing, and then there's all sorts of new things to do, and so on and so forth. But yeah, this post is coming from a hotel in California, practically within walking distance of Monterey Bay. I've been here since Saturday, and it's been quite the interesting adventure.

So I get to make it a series of posts! There's all sorts of things I've been doing, and it'd be way too much for any one post to take in. I'll try to provide pictures, where I have them, but I've mostly been letting everyone else take the pictures, so I actually don't have that many.

At any rate, the adventure started on Saturday with the most incompetent ground crew I've ever seen. We had a really early flight, so we had to be at the airport really early... and when we got there, we saw an absolute train wreck of a line to get to the baggage counter and no sense of proper routing or crowd control. Had we not taken advantage of the lack of control to, well, jump ahead a little, we probably would have missed our flight, despite getting there within a reasonable time.

Then when we do get to the gate... there's no gate agent, and the airplane's crew is just standing around chatting and having their breakfast. At first this wasn't a problem, because we still had a comfortable margin before the flight was scheduled to take off. It became a problem before too long, because there was still no one there nearly 15 minutes after the plane was supposed to start boarding. The flight took off a full half-hour late thanks to the total lack of any gate agents until it was way too late to board a 757's worth of people on time.

So, basically? Delta has a few things to work on as far as "efficiency" is concerned.

Thankfully we managed to get to our connecting flight on time and reach San Jose safely. From there it was a reasonably short drive south to Monterey itself. And from there, well... all sorts of things happened! I'll get to that with the next post.