Actually, I’ll tell Jacob’s tale of travels afar.
Some background: my dad works for American Airlines. This allows us some prvileges that come with being related to an employee of an airline, namely flying “cheaply”. I always have to qualify it when I talk about it, because while the employee and his immediate family get to fly at almost no cost to the traveler, the entire cost of the trip is added on to the employee’s payroll as a “bonus”, and he’ll get taxed on it as if it were a salary bonus.
When you fly on standby, there are two distinct categories: D-2 and D-3. D-2’s are for the employee and people living with them (in this case, my dad and my mom). D-3 are relatives who don’t live with them (me, Laureen, Jacob, and Jessie fall into this bucket). D-2s have priority over D-3s but have lesser priority than people moved from other flights due to overselling or people who pay to fly standby. Paying passengers, as expected, come first.
So, when you want to travel, you usually wind up on flights that no one else wants to take, especially those early in the morning.
With all of that in mind, Jacob headed to the airport with my parents to fulfill a promise made to him almost 2 years ago: he would go to Boston and ride the Amtrak Acela train from Boston to Washington D. C. The trip had some other purposes as well: going to see my dad’s uncle who lived in Richmond, enjoying the trip.
The Acela train trip was scheduled for the weekend because Amtrak doesn’t offer discounts for children during the week. So, the plan was to take the train trip on Saturday.
To accommodate that, they set up a plan to fly out of DFW to Logan Airport on Friday, the 16th. They made it to the airport at 6 a.m.
When they got to the airport, my mom and dad discovered that it wasn’t going to be easy to get to Boston. As a matter of fact, it was impossible to get there on standby. Oversold flights, cancelled flights, etc., all of the things that travelers consider nuisances were factors in not being able to get to Boston that day. So, my mom consulted with the booking agent and came up with the idea of “okay, let’s get at least going somewhere, since we’ve already missed two flights”, and they got booked to La Guardia Airport in New York City.
This flight had space. So, they got tickets.
This was Jacob’s first flight. I’d tried to coach him on what to expect, including the possibility of not making a flight, but he was happy to get on board.
At this point, I’d like to thank American’s pilots, especially those on this flight. They were gracious and kind and let Jacob sit in the cockpit for a picture.
After an uneventful flight that Jacob truly enjoyed, they landed in New York City. Now came the interesting part. There were no available seats on anything from La Guardia to Boston. Mom and Dad consulted with another gate agent who advised against trying to drive. Instead, she suggested using the ID-90 process.
ID-90 is a method by which airline employees can travel on other airlines (on standby) at reduced rates. You pay 10 percent of the ticket cost, and you’re on another airline. The one catch about the process is that it’s only available for D-2s. D-3s, like Jacob, can’t use the ID-90 benefit. So, my parents wound up purchasing a day-of-use, one-way ticket to get Jacob to his train. They arrived late Friday night.
The next day, they set out for the train station to ride the Acela. It’s a beautiful train.
I’d consider this a pretty cool deal, even at age 39. Jacob really liked being on the train.
Unfortunately, fifteen minutes into the trip, they had to take everyone off of the train. Not just one, but BOTH pantographs (the part that connects the overhead power lines to the train) broke, and after three short stops, Jacob’s high speed rail adventure was over.
I got a phone call from Jacob at that point. He sounded sadder than I had ever heard him. It broke my heart to hear that he wouldn’t get to ride the Acela all the way, because they could have waited for the next Acela train, but that would have meant missing their train connection from D. C. to Richmond. So, they brought out a regular electric train and completed the journey. My dad was a bit peeved that regular Amtrak trains don’t offer WiFi (the Acela does, it being a lifeline of the business traveler). In Washington D. C., they switched electric locomotives for diesels and completed the journey.
Jacob got to visit Yorktown while he was there.
And Jacob did have his first experience with touching the ocean.
So, all in all, it was an eventful trip. Amtrak is giving us a voucher for the cost of the tickets so that we can go back sometime and try again.
If there’s a lesson to be learned, it must be this: experiences matter. Good and bad, they matter.
