Don't fly United Express

So, I am in Montreal now. It seems to be a fun city from what I've seen of it which isn't much yet. Getting here was an ordeal though. Ugh.

I am currently a student volunteer and in a student design competition at the CHI2006 conference. I flew out to Montreal on Saturday after getting 4 hours of sleep the night before. We left Detroit on United Express. Don't fly United Express. It was about 15 minutes late leaving Detroit. that wasn't so bad except that we really only had about 45 minutes to get onto our connection at Dulles. This was before we realized that it was pouring rain or that we needed to take 2 shuttles to the other gate in DC. So as we are landing, we see the rain and of course we have to get off the plane without a bridge and had to run through the rain to the terminal. Our poster is too long to fit in the poster tube so we had to cover that and what better to cover it than with a barf bag...I knew they were good for something. Mattbot was kind enough to go to GAP and buy me a new jacket which looks pretty smart because otherwise, I would have froze for those two rainy days.

So we got off the plan successfully, only to encounter the first of two shuttles that looked like a stormtrooper carrier. No, I am not geeky enough to know what they were actually called in the SW movies. Anyway, the best feature of this machine was that the driver had to walk from the one 'cockpit' all the way through the tram like inside to get to the other side in order to get into the other 'cockpit' to drive away in the other direction. After that we got to another terminal in which we walked through for five minutes in order to get to yet another shuttle. Finally, we get to Terminal G which just has a whacked out way of getting people to the gates. There was a series of about 7 doors in which each had about 4 gates attached to it and the doors had a line of planes above it. It was so confusing. When we got there our flight was delayed as the passengers deboarded in the rainstorm. When we finally boarded, we saw all of the baggage lying on the ground in about 2 inches of water. Don't fly United Express. After carefully covering our poster again, we ran to the plane one by one in the rain.

After boarding we were delayed another hour as they had to rescan the luggage because they mixed them up with some other plane. (Remember this and don't fly United Express.) Once we're off the ground we're fine until we wait for our bags in Montreal...and wait...and wait. Three of our bags didn't make it. We have to wait in a long line to fill out a claim because there were several people whose bag didn't make it. Don't fly United Express. They tell us that the bags will probably be sent to Chicago or Toronto which have more flights directly to Montreal and we may get them that night. Cool.

No it was a lie. We called on Sunday and they were still in Dulles and they were probably going to be on the same flight that we took the day before...so we should call back at 7 to see if it landed. They did arrive this time. The downside was that they were soaked. It was probably because they were sitting in two inches of rain for 24 hours. As we speak, my clothes are strewn throughout my room drying. Don't fly United.

Oh and by the way, we also left the poster at the airport as we were trying to find a shuttle to the hotel. We didn't realize this until we were halfway to the hotel and there was no turning back. Yes, this was also United Express' fault because the airline made us temporarily insane. Finding a printer in Montreal on a Sunday was difficult but we did find one and it was done by 8:30 Monday morning and I got to set it up myself.

The hotel is nice. We were booked in a Sheraton for being student volunteers for the 5 days that we will be here. No complaints about the hotel.