Philadelphia to Paris - Second Leg

NOTE: If you've been looking us here, thanks. The Wi-Fi signal where we're at went on the fritz and just came back up. Hopefully, we're good to go now for the remainder of the trip.

I forgot to mention my digital media player. LOL

It's not my intention to turn this into a US Airways bashing site, but they really just keep on demonstrating how poorly they operate.

At the ticketing desk in Orlando, the agent told us that when we arrived in Philadelphia we would have to go to a different US Airways terminal to catch our connecting flight. That seemed kind of odd, so at the gate I asked the agent if we would have to go through security again since the ticket agent had told us we had to go to a different terminal. The gate agent said we actually only had to go one gate over from our arriving gate, so I felt some better, though still not trusting the fact that I was getting differing stories.

Our flight from Orlando to Philadelphia was scheduled to leave at 2:35 pm, but we didn't go wheels up until 3:00 pm. We were already on a short turn-around for catching our connecting flight from Philadelphia to Paris, and this delay cut further into that time. I was really hoping that the gate agent, and not the ticket agent, had the right story.

When we finally arrived in Philadelphia and disembarked from the flight, it turned out the gate agent was correct. We were so late arriving that we literally walked off our flight and into the line that was already loading for the next flight. We had just enough time for me to stand in line while Cindy and her mom went to the ladies room and then for me to go to the men's restroom while they held out place, before we were herded onto the A303.

And this harkened back to an earlier problem we had with US Airways. We booked our flight in January, purchasing our 3 tickets at the same time and receiving our seat assignments, 3 seats together. In March, when Cindy called to do a check on our seats, we were told first that we weren't even booked (though we had the e-mail confirmation) and then we were told that there had been an "equipment change" (meaning a different airplane was going to be used) and that the new seating configuration had us spread out around the plane.

Uh, no.

We got that straightened out, only to have the SAME thing happen again when we checked again in April (Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me). I was truly beginning to think these people were monkeys with keyboards. I finally demanded and received a confirmation in writing from a supervisor regarding our seating assignments a week before we left.

So, we load onto the bigger plane that was substituted for the previous one. You would hope that "bigger" would translate into "more comfortable", but instead it simply means "add more seats, make more money". Trust me when I tell you that coach seats are not made for a 6' 4" 270 pound passenger. My knees were jammed up against the back of the seat in front of me and my upper body extended so far over the top of my seat that if I tried to lay my head back I simply ended up staring at the ceiling, lol. That's not a complaint against US Airways per se, because all the airlines try to cram as many paying customers into the plane as is possible, But it was an uncomfortable 7 hour flight. It was impossible for me to sleep so I read, listened to my digital media player and did some work on my laptop, though that too was a convoluted ballet consisting of me placing pillows under the seatback tray to raise the level up to my chest level and then angling the laptop into a "V" with the front edge resting on my chest so I could see the screen.

Kudos to the pilot who performed the smoothest take off I have ever experienced, and for doing his best to minimize the effect of the turbulence we ran into over the middle of the north Atlantic Ocean. And he got us into Paris 20 minutes early!

Next up, our first day in France.

Thanks for reading