(Written by kencraw)

After the game Saturday afternoon, we headed up to Cleveland. Let me say one last thing about Columbus… I’ve never had it so easy getting in and out of a stadium, which is particularly surprising considering it had 105K people there, none who left before the end of the game. There was no meaningful traffic leaving the stadium.

We headed to Cleveland because I didn’t book by return trip from Springfield, MA, but from Cleveland. Unlike the beginning of the trip when there was a reason to over-shoot Columbus to see my brother, there wasn’t much of a reason to head back to Massachusetts just to get back on a plane. (Well, one small reason: to keep my brother company on the ride… oh well!)

What made this trip interesting flight wise, was I was never in the same airport twice. I went from SFO to Detroit to Springfield, then drove to Columbus, then Cleveland to Chicago to Sacramento.

Cleveland was a very stinky town. It didn’t help that we parked over a drain grate and the car smelled like sewage all evening. It was also more humid than the rest of the trip, assumably because of the proximity to Lake Erie.

As a side note, I’ve been to Lake Erie before, sailing in the Bemis youth national sailing championship out of Mentor Harbor, OH, which is just up the road from Cleveland. I almost took my brother there to see the site of the regatta, but we were running out of gas. That trip as a teenager also meant that I only added one trip to my list of state’s visited (West Virginia) this trip.

The 1 hour flight from Cleveland to Chicago continued the good trend of half empty flights, yet again getting a whole row to myself (nobody likes to sit next to me… I wonder why?). That good luck ended on the jam-packed flight from Chicago to Sacto.

Today’s flights were on Southwest and it’s amazing to me how much everyone has gotten on the check-in early bandwagon. I actually checked in from The Horseshoe the day before because I forgot at 8:30 AM, a full 24 hours before, to check-in. Nevertheless, it was only 11:30 AM, a full 21 hours before the flight and 110 people had already checked in (out of about 170 on this larger 737-800). Since Southwest has the first-come-first-served model, I was worried I wouldn’t get an isle or window seat, but I was able to get one in the back.

The worst part of said flight was not any of that but the delay. They came on the intercom shortly after they had started priority boarding (in other words the lady in the wheelchair had already been taken on the plane) to say they had a mechanical problem and they were going to try and fix it. We may need to change planes (which we all implicitly knew meant it could be a long delay). Stay put and don’t leave the gate area!

That not leave the gate area was the frustrating bit. There weren’t nearly enough seats and they came back every 10-15 minutes to tell us the same thing. Over an hour later, when we could have all gone to the nearest restaurant/bar/whatever to relax while we waited, but instead were sitting patiently with seats for only a third of us, the finally boarded us.

Not exactly the worst disaster ever, but still a bit frustrating.

I did take the layover opportunity in Chicago to record a OTRH podcast, so look for that either later tonight or tomorrow morning.

The flight got into Sacramento at around 1:45, just over an hour late and I was pretty tired, still being on Eastern time feeling like it was nearly dinner time. I also was feeling more on the positive side of the ledger of whether it was a missed opportunity or a positive sign.

Overall a good trip and I’d recommend a trip to Columbus when the opportunity presents itself to all Bear fans.