Dad's Memorial Service - Part 1: The Journey

I'm assuming all who read this (it is a pretty limited audience) know about the death of my father in January and for the family's plans for a memorial service in Pittsburgh this past Friday. Being the clever and frugal grouch that I am, I purchased my tickets a couple months in advance via Expedia.com to get a good price. Unfortunately due to Mary's scheduled trip to Sacramento with her 5th grade class which she was leading she was unable to go to Pittsburgh. Craig and Kurt are both in school and couldn't get away. Marla flew with me and Claire and Laura drove.

Thursday May 7th: Marla and I depart Santa Clarita at 5 a.m. for a 8 a.m. flight. You never know what traffic will be like on the 405 headed to LAX. In this case there was no traffic so we were to the airport and ready to check in by 6:15. Feeling a bit smug at our planning and travel efficiency we walked into terminal 4 to check in with Delta. Ooops! Turns out the flight was listed as Delta but actually flown by Northwest. We were told the flight was delayed but no worries since we had about a two hour layover in Minneapolis. We were told to take our bags to the TSA kiosk to have our bags X-rayed and then proceed to terminal 2. The officious TSA lady told us to not even stop there, proceed to the next kiosk (and she wasn't even nice about it). Ok, no problem, off to the next kiosk. The guy there told us to turn right around and go back to the first place with our bags. I told him we were directed to his place. 'Doesn't matter. Go back and tell her that she has to take the bags. Go on, get out of here.' So back we went. The lady started yelling at us to go back to the other place. 'I don't care what he said, don't you dare leave the bags here!' I started to get mad when Marla repeated several times that the bags were NW Airlines which was the magic words. Another TSA agent quietly took the bags. I was so mad I found a supervisor, ratted out all of the employees and told him that the last time I was run back and forth like that was in 1975 at basic training and I wasn't in the mood for it anymore. He claimed that he would handle it. I'm guessing they all had a good laugh about it when we left.

On to terminal 2, blood pressure returning to normal. The Northwest counter had a line at it for our flight. We weren't going to make our connection. No worries, they gave us tickets on US Air in terminal 1. We proceeded to terminal 1 to exchange our vouchers for boarding passes. The ticket lady looked at our paperwork and told us that what we had was essentially trash. 'Go back to Northwest and make them give you tickets!' she demanded. At that point I could feel the pressure release safety valve in me just about ready to explode. She looked at me and decided that she'd try 'one more thing' to see if she could issue our tickets. What a surprise, she could!

We arrived in Pittsburgh and Claire and Laura met us. Two of our three bags showed up. No sign of the garment bag with my suit or Marla's Air Force class A blue uniform she wanted to wear to honor my father, a WW2 Air Force veteran. We filled out the claim form and headed to the Killmeyer compound in Imperial.

Next: The memorial service