Well, my impression of the American airline industry just gets better and better: my United flight to Salt Lake City at 1:19pm was cancelled, so they shoved me on a Delta Airlines flight at 3pm instead. Oh vey, another 2 hours of killing time at Los Angeles airport! (Though I admit I’ve actually been productive and have been hacking on TextExtras as I intended to in the last blog, so it wasn’t much of a waste of time.) At least the staff are pretty friendly: they do seem quite sympathetic to the numerous screw-ups that keep happening. I don’t think I’ve had a single trip to the USA in the past 2 or 3 years where something didn’t go wrong.

The good part of the story is that I managed to book myself on an earlier Delta flight which left Los Angeles at 1pm, so oddly enough I ended up catching an earlier flight than the one which was cancelled. The bad part of the story is that means I had to move terminals yet again. My Qantas flight into Los Angeles arrived at the Tom Bradley International terminal, from which point I walked with Don to Terminal 5 since I was killing time and didn’t have anything better to do. Then, onward to Terminal 8, where my cancelled United flight was, and then back to Terminal 5 for my final Delta flight. In conjunction with the Auckland stopover, that meant I’d gone through security screening four times. Fun, fun, fun.

The really bad part of the story is that my baggage didn’t travel with me on the flight and got misdirected somewhere between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, although the baggage assistant dude who helped me claimed that it’s very likely coming on the next United flight, which lands in Salt Lake City at 6pm. Since there’s not much else I can do about that, I’ll just pray it does come, otherwise I’ll be wearing my Afterglow long-sleeve shirt again tomorrow …