Our United flight wasn’t scheduled to depart until 11am, so we felt we had given ourselves adequate time by being out the door by 9am to begin our journey toward the airport that is only five miles away. But like always on these islands, everything seems to go a little bit wrong. We dropped the car off in central Ponta Delgada as opposed to the airport itself because this is evidently what I had in my initial reservation. Clearly it must have been a lot cheaper. It seemed maybe slightly better run than its airport counterpart. We did, however, have to figure out a ride to the airport.
There is evidently only one man driving for Uber for the whole island and he kept canceling on Nicole because I guess he didn’t think the trip was far enough to be worthwhile. We then attempted to hail a taxi. While ten had probably driven by in the span of trying to get an Uber, now we couldn’t find one anywhere. We walked a couple blocks toward a plaza where we finally found one, but at least 15 minutes had elapsed.
Prior to committing to the taxi, I inquired the price, which was naturally about two euro more than I had in spare coins, so we had to also go to an ATM. After getting some cash, we headed (slowly) to the airport, stuck behind a large truck merging onto a ramp at about 10 kph. It was like a sick joke. We couldn’t even be upset because it was all so absurd. We arrived at the airport about an hour prior to our departure time. The United app didn’t allow us to check-in for unknown reasons, so we were well past the usual 90 minute cutoff for international flights and only 45 minutes prior by the time we got to the ticket agent. Then it became this whole other thing…
Like we had teleported into an Abbott and Costello skit, the gentleman kept saying he couldn’t check us in because we had paper tickets. We both assured him that everything we did was online, there were no paper tickets, and yet he kept asking for them. Furthermore, despite going through all the effort to upload our test results through the United app that showed us as “Travel-Ready” with a green check mark, the gentleman insisted there was no proof of this. I had to pull up the results once again. Ultimately I made an entirely new booking (35 minutes before the plane was supposed to leave) and somehow this worked though it was all sorts of a mess.
We still didn’t have seats, but were at least able to go through security, though not without the security people rummaging through Nicole’s entire backpack. I was also asked to take everything out of my pockets, but when I put my phone and wallet in the bin, I was told to put my money back in my pocket. Ok… Then for customs, we got in the international line and were stopped by someone saying, “No no!, this is international only, please go to the line on the right!” Was a flight to the United States not international? Furthermore, the line on the right was labeled “EU passports only.” It’s like we had entered the twilight zone, except it was gate 3. We both received messages on our phones that we had received seats — not together, but economy plus at least. With our seat assignments, we attempted to board. We scanned our tickets (which indicated our assigned seat number on the gate agent’s screen), when the same man from check-in appeared out of nowhere to stop us from going forward. “You need a boarding pass!” We explained we had been assigned seats on the app, but (rather ironically) he now wanted us to have paper tickets. We were at a loss for words. After he reflected on his paper ticket paradox, we were ultimately allowed to get on the plane. Wow.
Our plane was a 737-MAX8, which Nicole was a little apprehensive about, but I let her know that the overhead bins are larger on the MAX, so we wouldn’t have to worry about checking a bag (even though our friend the ticket agent had encouraged us to do so a couple times). After all, Newark airport is unsurprisingly awful at getting bags back to people amongst many other things. I have already written two posts about why the Newark airport is terrible, and I simply do not have time for a third. Our flight went relatively smoothly and we each got a mediocre in-flight pasta meal to remind us that we were flying back to the mother country. In typical Newark fashion, our gate was unavailable upon landing, then no jetbridge driver when we had a gate. Luckily, we had experienced such bizarre inefficiencies at Portuguese airports lately, that Newark’s delays didn’t even seem that bad. From deplaning, we zoomed through Global Entry and were back on American soil for the first time in weeks. Reflections post to follow.
passports & pepto bismol 