Home safe and sound, but not uneventfully

Well, plumtreeblossom and I made it home, despite two delays and a quite serious sprint with our carry-on bags to a different terminal in Philadelphia to discover that our connecting flight had left and we had to go back to the original terminal to get on the next flight.

Our checked luggage has not made it home, and had not made it to Logan several hours after we landed. (plumtreeblossom needed to go to an event at theatreatfirst, so she grabbed a cab while I tried to find our luggage.) It may yet show up, but I am *ahem* displeased.

Suffice it to say that I will endeavour to avoid US Airways in future if possible.

In the past, I’ve mostly flown American, and they’ve had good coördination between ground and air about connections, and they’ve handled the case where a plane with a large number of people making a specific connection was delayed very well. Also, in the one case where I couldn’t find my luggage (which wasn’t their fault — another passenger with similar baggage had walked off with it), they gave me a meal voucher so I could get some food while I was waiting for them to try to track it down.

There are some good things I can say about how US Airways handled our troubles on the way home: A flight attendant whom we asked for connection information reseated us in aisle seats near the front of the aircraft so we could get off very quickly (which didn’t actually let us make our original connecting flight, but was probably instrumental in our managing to get on the flight we did make, so we were an hour and a half late rather than two or three hours late), and the person in baggage services we filed our tracking request with was very sympathetic and polite. Oh, and another person working in the baggage area gave us useful advice.

Anyway, our time in Vegas was great! It was excellent to see sionnagh and for her to meet plumtreeblossom, we had a couple really excellent and shockingly inexpensive meals among many very good and quite reasonably priced meals (reminder to self: eat at the Caravan Café at Sahara again next time), we had lots and lots of fun, and subtracting the money we spent on the casino floor from the money we won on the casino floor, plumtreeblossom and I both came out a bit ahead, which means the casino paid us $15 or so to sit and entertain ourselves for a couple hours and drink free strawberry daiquiris. (We spent most of that couple hours at video poker machines that advertised a better than 100% return; I think they’re loss-leader machines. But they brought us free drinks there all the same.)

We also got to see the Star Trek Experience at the Hilton and a really impressive aerial silks performer at Circus Circus as well as nifty aerial work as part of the Bite show at the Stratosphere. And we rode the monorail to the other end of the Strip and saw the impressive exterior of the MGM Grand and sat and had a very pleasant time on the patio of a bar in New York, New York and, um, I’m sure there’s lots of other stuff I’m forgetting. Like the toothbrush story; I’m definitely forgetting that.

Oh, and I won singing stuffed chickens for plumtreeblossom and sionnagh and myself at Skee-ball at Circus Circus. (That’s another reason I hope our luggage is found.) sionnagh’s is named Tandoori, plumtreeblossom’s is named Pot Pie, and mine is named Cordon Bleu.

Pictures may follow in a few days. (Fortunately, I pulled the memory card from the camera on the theory I might look at pictures on the plane. Unfortunately, the camera itself is in my checked luggage.)

All in all, it was a fabulous trip and we had a wonderful time!

[EDIT: We saw the smoke from this forest fire in New Jersey from the air. It was impressive.]