Indy to San Francisco via Minneapolis

Yes it is a weird routing.  But if you want to fly on a legacy carrier, you have to accept their unorthodox "hub and spoke" routings.

I left work in Indy, jumped the in the Avis and headed to IND.  The second I booted up the phone I got the dreaded "Missed call from Delta Airlines" alert.

I checked the voice mail, and found that my flight up to MSP was an astounding 2 hours and 20 minutes late, cutting my connection time to about 30 minutes.

You can't solve these problems behind the wheel of a rental car, so as soon as I turned it in, I went inside the terminal and noticed that in 30 minutes another delayed IND-MSP flight was going to leave.  And I busted my butt getting to the TSA checkpoint.  Thank you Pre!  I cleared security in one minute at most and found the gate.

The agent was very accommodating and gave me a first class seat on this delayed flight.  I was surprised to get that, most of the time if you change a segment, you simply won't get the upgrade as you are too close to the departure time.

Thank you sir.

So this part of the post is written from the very nice DL Sky Club at the juncture point in MSP where all the concourses come together.

Well, it's not all perfect.  I have yet to clear the upgrade window on the MSP-SFO segment and it looks like I might not clear.  I did grab an aisle seat in the new "economy comfort" section.  Those seats aren't bad at all.  Hope the guys up front tonight enjoy their beverages.

Look at the big line of weather just south of IND; I was lucky that we weren't in a real mess.

More to come.

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/DAL964/history/20120905/1945Z/KIND/KMSP

South San Francisco:

The Delta 738 flew us out here in 3:38.  And considering that we did not land until 1130 PM local time, that makes for a long day.  When I got to the hotel here, I thought about how long had I been wearing my shoes?  The answer was approximately 20 hours.  It was a very long day.  Fortunately the airplane had in flight entertainment, TV, movies etc.  I watched the second half of the Dallas-New York Giants game, then fell asleep with the headphones on.

Here for less than 24 hours, then all the way back to TPA.

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/DAL2209/history/20120906/0230Z/KMSP/KSFO