Road Trip: Southwest

Day 18: Friday, May 09, 2025 - Travel

Day's statistics:
Weather: mid 70s
Steps: Steve 8,754; Linda 6,071
Travel: 138 miles

Breakfast was the same buffet as yesterday.

Today was the day we headed home. 😞
After breakfast, we just took our time, but headed to the airport.
I took a shot of the dash - I should have done this after I did the final fill-up - to document the final mileage.

We felt it would be better to kill time at the airport than it would be to kill time somewhere else and try to get to the airport - not knowing what sort of anything may crop up, like an accident or construction.

We found the Avis lot, parked, gathered our luggage, and headed to the terminal.
The flight was currently on-time, and we found out what terminal we needed to get to.

When going out, the TSAPrechCheck® mark wasn't on our ticket, but an airline employee added it for us.
This time, when we checked our bags and found that the TSAPrechCheck® mark wasn't on the ticket again, we decided, since we had so much time, to go to the TSA office to investigate.
We arrived and spoke to the agent. We confirmed our names and birthdates, but she couldn't pull up our names in her system and received an error. After a few minutes of conversation, it was determined that because we also have Global Entry® ID, we are supposed to use that code for tickets, not the TSAPrechCheck® ID when booking our flights - this just didn't sound right because GE is for international flights and we were taking a domestic flight (after we got home we determined that she was indeed wrong). So we headed to the Global Entry office. Well, we tried to. There was some construction going on IN the airport. We asked a security guard where the GE office was and he started to describe it and said, we'll just take you over there. It was rather hidden and we probably wouldn't have found it without their help. When we got there, there were already three people on line ahead of us. As we had no idea how long it was going to take to get through, and we didn't really NEED the PreCheck as we could just go through security, we ditched it and headed to Subway® to grab a sandwich so we'd be all set after going through security as we weren't sure what our eating options would be on the other side.
Because we didn't have the PreCheck, we were forced to go through the line with the riff-raff common folk masses. It really didn't take that long, but we DID have to take our shoes off.
We made our way to the gate, and after a while - it was early - we ate our sandwich.
As an aside: since we had the split seating on the way out - the first time ever for one of our flights - we decided to bite the bullet and pay for assigned seats to guarantee that we would be sitting together.

At 1:05, boarding began, but our group wasn't called for more than 15 minutes.
The plane began moving at 1:34, then it sat for ten minutes.
Our flight was the seventh in line to take off.

We moved again at 1:50 and took flight 2:12.
One last shot / view of some of the Rockies before taking flight.

Some in-flight views too.




The flight included a snack of biscuits and coffee.

After landing at 5:38 and making our way to the gate, we deplaned and fetched our luggage.

The shuttle for the parking lot showed up surprisingly fast - obviously they were already on their way - after they were called, as we joined six other passengers all returning home after their respective travels.
On the way home we stopped by Aldi to get our perishable groceries - only to find that they were already closed because it was so late.
So we stopped at Giant a little closer to home.

American Airlines refuses to accept responsibilty for their poor treatment of our luggage on the flight from PHL to PHX (my bag on the left), as they claim that this damage falls under the umbrella of "normal wear and tear", and is covered by THEIR policy of "Condition of Carrier". (This isn't a ding - that would have been "acceptable", this is much worse than that as the damaged section is nearly the size of my hand.)


Well, WE now have a policy to do whatever we can to NEVER fly on American Airlines again.

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