The 36 Hour Odyssey Home: White-Knuckled Driving, Extortion Fees, and Sled Work in an Airport....

I am finally home in Lake Placid, NY.  What a trip home it was.  I already posted during my car ride home on my Blackberry from middle-of-nowhere Montana (redundant, I know) but that really didn't tell the whole story.  I had quite the harrowing 36 hour adventure that would feature driving blindly in the snow, disassembling my sled in the middle of the airport, being pulled out of the line by TSA security at the airport, having philosophical conversations in French, and a Dunkin' Donuts latte being brutally ripped from my grasp.....(Chana is yelling at me as I type this that that last part is a manipulation of the facts, but I know the truth).





Have you ever driven through Montana in the winter?  My suggestion if you haven't is to avoid it at all costs.  Myself and 3 of the members of team USA got in our van in Calgary at 8:30am MST for the drive south to Salt Lake City, Utah.  We would not arrive there until a full 17 hours later at 1:30am MST the next day.

The first leg of the journey was the car ride to Salt Lake.  We were driving in a huge four wheel drive van that belongs to one of the members of team USA.  That didn't seem to matter though as we went careening down the icy roadways of Canada and Montana.  Although the drive started out uneventful enough, as we got into Montana it started to snow hard.  I had heard the term "white-out" before but I don't think I really appreciated it until this drive.  There was so much snow on the road that the road actually vanished for a few hours, and we could only use the reflective markers on either side of the road to delineate where it was.  I had personally never seen anything like it, and it made for some extremely white-knuckled driving on my part.  Normally I love to drive, but driving in this storm was nerve racking and exhausting.  I was slipping and sliding all over the place, hitting the rumble strip when I thought I was in the middle of the road, and just generally being scared out of my mind.  After three hours I was completely exhausted and needed to let someone else drive.



Driving through that storm cost us a lot of time.  We had made it up to Calgary with no snow in about 13 hours.  With the snow storm coming back though it took us a full 17 hours to get back.  I was never so desperate to get out of a car in my life.  It's just a really really long time to spend sitting around doing nothing.  When we finally got to Utah I can't even imagine what I looked like.  I was a disheveled mess and desperate to just be home already.  Unfortunately though, that was just the first leg of the journey.  After four hours on a couch at a friends house then, it was off to the airport.

If you ever can, fly Southwest.  They are by far the best airline in America and other than Air France the only airline I have ever taken that didn't send me into a rage at some point during my journey.  I originally was going to fly Southwest home from Salt Lake, but I decided to move my flight up a day.  Southwest was sold out, and so I used Chana's miles to get a flight on United.  When I flew Southwest to Utah, they charged me $50 to ship my sled, no questions asked.  United however was a completely different story.

Chana and I checked the price tables before we purchased the ticket on United.  It says that there is a 100 USD fee for "overweight or oversized" baggage.

This is the fee schedule:

Travel within or between North American countries/regions		Special items1, oversized, overweight or excess baggage
North America	Canada	100 CAD
	Caribbean	100 USD
	Central America	100 USD
	Mexico	100 USD
	United States	100 USD

 I think most normal people would interpret this to mean that if your bag is overweight, or oversized, then you pay a $100 fee.  Turns out that the table is deliberately misleading, as the fee schedule actually applies a $100 fee to each category.

There is a bullet point tucked in a list of them above the fee schedule that says:

If an item fits the criteria for more than one of the fees below, then multiple fees may apply.

However, because the rest of the web page details the rates for baggage for flights to various countries and continents, it seems as though that bullet point references flights that involve multiple countries.  Absolutely no where on the site does it say "we will charge you once for overweight and one for oversized."

It does not say that.  Anywhere. At all.

The bottom line is when I originally went to check the sled they wanted to charge me $100 for it being oversized PLUS $100 for it being overweight.

Needless to say I was not amused. 

Normally, I follow my mother's advice that "you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."  After the 18 hour car ride from Calgary though, I was in no mood for emotional control.  I immediately yelled at the United Agent "that's extortion!" and refused to pay the fee.  When I told her the website says it's $100 for oversized or overwieght luggage, she explained to me how the fee schedule was deliberately designed to mislead people so that United can slam you for an extra $100 when you are helpless at the check-in counter and have no choice but to pay their extortion fee. (OK so she didn't say that but through her saying "blah blah blah" I understood what she really meant.)


This is a truly phenomenal business model.  Try to squeeze $100 out of me now so that I will: 1)  Never fly your airline again; 2)  Write this blog post telling everyone what scam artists you are. 

Nice job, United.

::claps::

I honestly wasn't going to pay the fee.  However, they said to me that if the sled weighed 70lbs. or less, then there would be no overweight baggage fee and so it would only cost me the $100 for the "over sized" fee.  As it was, the sled + bag weighed about 77 lbs.  And so with that, the sled came out of the bag it was in and I went to work.  I literally right in front of the check-out counter (literally) took out all my tools, took off the yoga mat that covers my sled, and started unbolting things. 

I first took my runners out, and then unscrewed the weight plate that is in the back of the sled.  I took the weight plate, and put it on their scale, and then put the sled without the weight plate or runners on the scale.  I was way underweight, and so I put the runners on top of the sled without the weight plate.  It weighed EXACTLY 70 pounds.  They told me I would only have to pay the $100 "oversize" fee, and I paid it.  I then walked away from a United Check-in counter for the last time in my life, I promise you.

To accomplish this magic trick, I had wrenches, Allen wrenches, screwdrivers, and knives all scattered about me on the floor of the airport.  I basically turned the United check-in counter into my own personal work bench.  Needless to say, I was quite the spectacle and people were asking me all kinds of questions as I worked.  It was quite hilarious.  A special thank you goes out to the woman who reminded me that I had left my saddle bolts and wrench on the floor after I had cleaned up, wherever she is now.  Saved me a few bucks there.

And so we are finally off to O'Hare.  Now all I had to do was go through the security screening process.  So I go through and get a fully body dose of Gamma Rays (still not the Incredible Hulk....yet) from those new machines that are causing such a ruckus and then wait for my duffel bag on the other side of the security checkpoint.  My bag gets about 2in out of the x-ray machine before it gets grabbed by a TSA officer.  I'm the lucky winner!  Of course.

The TSA officer opens up my bag and I just start to laugh.  You may wonder what I did with the weight plate that I took out of my sled?  Well, I put it in my bag of course.  What is the weight plate made out of....

Lead.  Of course.

And so I had effectively blocked TSA from seeing inside my duffel bag with the x-ray machine because I had placed a lead plate on top of the contents.  I'm probably lucky they didn't just tackle and arrest me before they even bothered to open up the duffel bag.  Instead, they ran my bag through the scanner again sans weight plate and then took everything out of my bag before sending me on my way.

Yeah, kinda happy that I didn't get arrested there and end up spending the rest of the day and night playing twenty questions with the FBI.  Here's how that convo would have gone...

"Oh sure, of course I can explain why I had a lead plate and bolts covering my duffel-bag at the airport officer... 

See....I go head first down an ice chute for Israel...yes, head-first sledding, it's called "Skeleton" and it's all the rage in Canada and so....no really....what? Well, no, I'm not technically an Israeli citizen yet but I'm getting citizenship soon.....what's soon?  Oh, I don't know....6 months to a year?....

Um, why are there no stamps or visas in my passport then from Israel?  Well, see, that's because I've never been there.....yes, I did say that compete for them anyway in head-first sledding, which like I said, is HUGE in Canada.....

How is that possible?   It's this thing called the "Law of Return".... it's a Jewish thing you probably wouldn't understand....no sir I'm not being fresh with you.....but yes I'm competing for them based on this law, which was promulgated in 1950 ....yes, even though I'm not a citizen and have never been there....OH, no no no officer it's not that I don't have any ties there at all, see I used an internationally unrecognized address in the West Bank on my competition forms because that's where my girlfriend's family lives....no actually I couldn't tell you that address off hand because like I said I've never actually been there....

Oh, why did I pay for this flight two days ago with another person's frequent flyer miles?....Well, errrr....haha  funny story see I had a different flight for tomorrow but I decided to change it because I just drove across the border from Canada into Montana with three of my friends and....no they aren't here...."

Of course, this all seems perfectly plausible and in no way suspicious as a story for someone traveling with a lead sheet over their duffel bag in the middle of an air travel security crisis, but I just would have felt really bad wasting the FBI's time.

Luckily, I avoided doing that was able to just continue on to my flight.  This flight was actually the highlight of my journey.  I met a really interesting woman, from Quebec, who is a teacher and spoke French.  We talked a lot about the realities of the new economy and the need to really get out there and make things happen for yourself.  Being passive and waiting to get scraps from others just isn't going to cut it anymore.  She made me feel really good about what I am doing, and I appreciated her kind words and support.  I enjoyed speaking with her (I'm always looking for people to babble on to in French) and if she is reading this hope she will keep in touch!

Other than that the trip was pretty uneventful.  I had asked Chana to get me a Dunkin Donuts latte, which she did at the airport, and which she then promptly drank while I was collecting my bags and sled.  ::Grumble::  All in all it was the longest, most ridiculously terrible trip of my life.  I was also in the beginning stages of a cold (which has now gone full-bore, thanks for asking) which makes the whole thing even more miserable.  My ears hurt so much during descents that I almost cried.

Now though, I'm home.  I'm ready to take a few days off and just relax.  Once I get over this cold though it's going to be all business from here.  I learned a lot on this trip (which I will outline in a future post) and although I didn't consider this last race a success, the trip definitely was.  There is so much that goes into being a competitor on tour.  Now that I have had one go of it though, I'll be much more prepared for the future.

I'm seriously ready to get after it.


Happy Thanksgiving everyone!



Catch you at the bottom of the hill-

Bradley