We all have a bucket list. Mine mostly revolves around travel and food. (See more on my travel adventures here.) One item on my list was seeing the interior of Alaska, and the other was taking a first class flight. I am happy to report that this summer I got to check two of those items off my list.
Taking Flight
Now, in full transparency, I have been in first class before. It was on a flight from California to Arizona for Spring Training with my bestie. We purchased an upgrade at the airport, thinking we were going to live the high life, forgetting that the flight lasted less than an hour. We were imagining fine dining in the skies, and what we got was additional legroom and an extra cookie. Although the cookie was warm, it wasn’t worth the extra $35 per person we paid.
Fast forward 20+ years and thousands of reward miles later, we were finally able to book a first-class flight to Alaska for a land tour and cruise. Even better, there were enough miles to take my family along. So my bestie, along with my mom, dad, and brother, embarked with me on a new adventure.
Now this first-class flight was far superior to my last one. It started with sparkling wine, so how bad could it be? Of course we ran into issues right away. If I’m on the trip, that is bound to happen. I probably should have anticipated this issue with the troubles we had booking the flight, but I am an eternal optimist. Let me explain.
Time For a Name Change
My dad and brother share similar names. They are not a senior and a junior, but they have the same first name and their middle names begin with the same initial. So when booking our flight, we needed to do two separate reservations. One with my dad and mom, and one with my bestie, brother, and me. Even though they have different birthdays, etc., the system would not process them on the same reservation.
Fast forward several months, with different reservation numbers, we preordered food for our flight and had no issues. That is, of course, until the flight attendant started checking in with all of us about our food orders. They had no order for my brother, even though he was on our reservation and our orders were received. My dad, who ordered a salad, had my brother’s burger listed as his choice. It was chaos.
Warm Nuts… Who Knew?
Luckily, there was an extra salad on board so everything worked out in the end. As a bonus, we also got free miles for a future flight for all the trouble. However, this trend continued on each subsequent flight, but everyone got what they ordered in the end. And I am still none the wiser as to why it kept happening and can only conclude that their similar names caused the issue.
Other than the food debacle, our flights were amazing. The food was even decent for plane food. My favorite part was the warm nuts. I have a friend who often shares his flying adventures, and I have always laughed about the warm nuts, but now I get it. It will be hard flying coach after this experience.
Flight Arrival in Anchorage
We arrived in Anchorage, and I was a little worried about the next steps. I’ll be honest, the cruise line did not share enough information for the land tour portion of our travels. I had every last detail about the cruise, but this portion of our trip was a little murky. This did not help my neurodivergent brain in the slightest. My project management self was not happy that I did not know every detail.
Fingers Crossed This Works
We had trouble getting flight information on our account with the cruise line because we booked our own air travel. We were instructed to call with the information about four weeks out, and no one at the cruise line seemed to know how to add the information. It took some time, but we got everything squared away, and I was still nervous about our transportation to the hotel being readily available.
As luck would have it, the cruise desk was right next to the luggage carousel. We got our luggage right away and were whisked off to our downtown hotel to meet our tour guide, Ben. Ben gave us far more detailed information about our trip, along with info about other tours we could take. But me being me, I had already planned things for our group, so additions were unnecessary.
Vacations Should Never Start This Early
After that it was straight to bed. It was a long day, and we had just discovered that our luggage would need to be outside of our room by 6 am for collection. I was not prepared to be up that early on vacation, but sometimes adventure requires sacrifice, or so I am told.
Hope you can join me next week for more of my Alaskan adventures.
