There is no easy way to get from Albuquerque, USA to Southeast Asia. It's just a long way. You have options but they are all trade-offs on a theme of it is a long way and it takes a long time. You add that our first real stop is a place (Medan, Indonesia) that is not easy to get to (much like Albuquerque), then you add more time and effort required. And as I've related in the past, if you're balancing saving money, but still having comfort, it's going to add to the amount of time required to make the journey.
In our case, we are flew to San Francisco today on one ticket (where we will spend the night), and are doing a self-transfer to another flight that takes us to Kuala Lumpur (via Tokyo). We will overnight again in KL before taking another self-transfer for the short flight to Medan.
Our flight to SF was mercifully smooth. It was an early afternoon flight so no getting up too early. And we got upgraded to First which rarely happens these days. Upon arriving and collecting our bags, I called the hotel to find out when the shuttle came round. I'd called earlier in the day and had been told it does its round every 40 minutes. This time they told me that the shuttle wouldn't start again until 5:15pm (It was 3:30). What! We're supposed to cool our jets for almost two hours? The person on the phone told me to take a shuttle for the larger hotel across the street.
This seemed a bit wonky to me, but we did it because I wasn't going to waste that amount of time sitting around. Sure enough, the shuttle for the other hotel shows up quickly. It is filled with mostly airline crews. The driver is a young woman and she is doing a yeoman's job getting all the luggage in the back of the bus.
I was feeling appreciative watching her really doing the work when we got off and was going to tip her anyway. But I noticed that none of the airline crew members tipped. So I gave her more of a tip than I might normally because she was really working hard. We were the last to get our bags off the shuttle. I thanked her and I mentioned we were actually going to the hotel across the street. Wouldn't you know it, she offers to take our bags across the busy road way for us.
I know I tipped her but I didn't give her that much money. There was no crosswalk between the hotels. We would have had to walk a ways to get to the crossing light. So this really saved us a lot of effort. What a lovely bit of kindness.
We decided we didn't trust the shuttle of our own hotel to get us to the airport tomorrow, so we've reserved and Uber to give us some peace-of-mind. Tomorrow is the long, long trip.
No comments:
Post a Comment