I have decided upon a few rules which apply to traveling and plane trips. If the flight is going to leave at 7AM, you will not get much sleep the night before. Since the trip to the airport usually takes an hour or so, and you have to be there a little early, there are some very early wake-up times involved, and since I tend not to go to sleep before midnight, this means that there's maybe a 3 hour amount of sleep the night before. Not really a good situation, so I think in the future I will try to not take morning flights. In this particular case there were other constraints which meant that it'd have been fairly hard to do anything else, but it did reinforce the badness of morning flights.
The flights we took were actually rather interesting. We went to Chicago and back, without going to the same airport twice. The initial flight was LAX to Chicago O'Hare, and the return flight was Chicago Midway to Ontario. Pretty crazy, we also had a different airline for each flight. They got us there in time though, which is what really matters.
I had a few other thoughts about traveling: if you are going to need to take a taxi one-way and the distance is fairly large (like Evanston to Midway), it may be cheaper overall to just get a rental car, which also adds some extra mobility during the extra time you'll get to use it. This also seemed possibly true for the return: we got into Ontario early in the morning, so I didn't want to ask any of our friends for a ride, but the shuttle was fairly expensive. If we could have done a rental car from there to Pasadena and dropped it off at Pasadena, it would likely have been cheaper, plus we'd have some extra mobility for the day. Some things to think about next time we are planning a trip, for this one I'm just glad to be home and get some more rest. I wish we could have stayed longer, maybe schedule the flights different so that it'd been more restful while there too, but at least now I know some of the pitfalls.
2 comments:
I agree that morning flights suck, but somehow the message doesn't really sink in long-term for me and I periodically have them anyway.
8am is the earliest I'm willing to schedule a flight. I can usually sleep on the plane and make up for some of the lost sleep, but any earlier than that and I may not get any sleep at all--I tend to be kind of wired the night before I travel and it makes it hard to fall asleep anyway.
My worst early-morning flight experience was actually going to Northwestern for Josh's graduation. I had a 6am flight (I waited too long to get the tickets and it was the only one available), got zero sleep the night before, and then the flight was delayed for nine hours during which I had to sit around at the airport and not fall asleep.
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