We’re heading out to the airport. If anything ridiculous / amazing / tragic happens, I’ll do a final update. Otherwise, that’s my report from the fourth annual Denver Improv Festival.
Famous last words at the end of yesterday’s blog post. Of course, I went and tempted fate…
Kelly and I had three hours between our hotel check-out time of 11:00am and car rental return time of 2:00pm to chill out in Denver before our flight home at 4:15pm. We spent the first hour chatting with Jill Bernard, Joe Bill, and Jon Lannen in the hotel lobby. I told Jon that if I’d known it the festival was so close to his birthday (it’s today, by the way, so happy birthday, bro), I would’ve dragged him onstage and plucked out ‘Happy Birthday’ on the uke. After hugs and photos (photos to come), we bid farewell at around 12:00pm.
Then we drove to the northeast side of town to find a gas station and somewhere to eat. We decided to go with lunch first and then took the next hour trying to find a gas station. I do not exaggerate when I say there were no gas stations around at all. Shopping complexes? Sure. Eateries? You betcha. Gas stations? Nope. When we finally saw one, we were on a highway going in the opposite direction and couldn’t find an exit. We even asked a trucker for help and he looked up gas stations on his laptop for us. By the time we finally found a gas station, it was 2:30pm.
We dropped off the rental car at 2:40pm (no late penalty, what a relief!) and took the shuttle to the airport. We arrived at 2:55pm and made our way through check-in (3:00pm), security (3:15pm), the light rail (3:20pm), and all the way down to our gate (3:30pm) just in time to use the restroom (3:31pm) and wait for a mere fourteen minutes until they began boarding our flight (3:45pm). That was not a very fun hour. I think I truly understand the “arrive two hours early” rule. It’s not because of tightened security taking longer – it’s so you don’t end up all panicked and end up looking a sweaty, suspicious character.
The flight took off on time, more or less, but they had to announce over and over to remove coats from the overheard compartment bins to make way for larger pieces of carry-on luggage. Truly, this is the unfortunate (and likely unanticipated by Frontier) side-effect of Frontier Airlines’s new policy of charging $15 per checked bag. That charge is both ways, so we paid $60 for our luggage plus, when my bag tipped the 50-pound scale (I guess those extra books and my new DIF t-shirt added up to over two pounds) they threatened to charge the overweight fee on top of the $15. We rearranged Kelly’s bag and got both bags checked for the low, low cost of $30 total. People don’t want to pay this fee to solve the airlines’ financial woes. Instead, they’re overloading the overhead compartment bins and there’s not enough room for people’s stuff. Hey. Airline industry. Maybe if you ran your industry in the competitive freemarket nature every other American-based industry runs themselves so that the last thing your customers worried about was price over quality, you may not be in this stupid mess and passing the cost on to the consumer. Jerk airline industry.
My tirade is over, as is my tale. We made it back home, sound and safe. I’ll get our final photos up on this post later today. Thanks for reading.
-nm