Posts Tagged Northwest Airlines

Heading Home

We took the Gatwick Express from Victoria Station.

We left London Gatwick, onboard Northwest Airlines Flight 31 to Detroit, scheduled at 1:40pm but more like 1:30. Upon arrival in Detroit about half an hour early at 4:50, we went through immigration, customs, and the often overlooked APHIS. We then connected homeward. I took NWA #1869 leaving at 7:05 to Indianapolis and She was onboard NWA #1475 to New Orleans. My flight was scheduled to arrive at 8:13, but managed an early arrival at 8:00.

I managed to work my way through the second and third Harry Potter novels while winging my way home, as well as finish grading memos written by my students, so I felt like it was a good flight home.

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Saturday before Thanksgiving

  • My friend and I met at the Detroit Airport. She had flown from New Orleans (NWA #1474, scheduled arrival at 7:48) and I from Indianapolis onboard Northwest Airlines flights.
  • When I originally scheduled, I was supposed to be on NWA 185 arriving DTW at 8:09, giving me 1:14 to switch planes. However with schedules being rewritten randomly, I got nervous when it was changed to NWA #360 arriving at 8:19–1:04 to switch planes at Detroit. 1:14 is tight, 1:04 is nearly impossible given Detroit’s current layout. I switched to NWA #1002, schedule to arrive at 5:49, or 3:36 to make the connection. I, for one, am looking forward to the new Midfield Terminal, scheduled to open in February 2002.
  • I actually met the flight from New Orleans, but I had to ask when and where it was arriving because NWA has taken down arrival monitors on the concourses at DTW–I guess under the assumption that since only ticketed passengers are on the concourses nobody is meeting planes.
  • From Detroit we connected to NWA Flight 32 (scheduled departure at 9:25) with service to London. Good thing that I had gotten on the earlier flight–we had to be onboard by 9:05, and that would have left me something like 46 minutes to change planes. Right–like that would ever happen.
  • The flight was fine–I sat down, we took off and I was reading David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day. Big mistake–it kept me awake and reading until the wee hours–I ate my dinner, and then finally went to sleep. I don’t remember them picking up my finished dinner, I just know that sometime after dinner I found something better than any alarm clock–that Northwest Airlines flight attendant wandering around the aisle of the plane shouting “duty free” every five seconds. It woke me up–and I was immediately reminded of a Whose Line is it Anyway (British Version on Comedy Central. Drew Carry on ABC sucks. He’s not funny, but he thinks he is.) skit where onboard duty free shopping was parodied. It took me awhile to fall back asleep.

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2001 Thanksgiving Vacation: Pre-Trip Notes

The Reasons

In October, 2001, Northwest Airlines made some unbelievable offers to get people flying again. One of the offers they made was for travel to Europe in November with a 6,000 WorldPerks mile discount. This meant that an off peak round trip ticket to Europe could be had for 34,000 miles instead of the normal 40,000 miles. To give frequent fliers an added bonus, this discount was combinable with a previously existing 1,000 mile discount for booking our award travel online. In short one could fly to Europe from the US for 33,000 miles.

A friend and I decided that we wanted to visit Europe and settled on Thanksgiving week as well as London after some debate. Thanksgiving week because it meant missing the minimum amount of work possible, and London because she had already been there. I flew from Indianapolis and she flew from New Orleans. My initial out of pocket expense was US$78.91 in taxes and fees.

The happy news was that the 7,000 miles I saved (I had more than enough for a standard off peak reward trip to Europe) was readily combined with my initial miles out of 40,000 incoming (note: sign up expired 31Sept01!) from Sprint Long Distance, and a few other miles (like Dining For Miles), to already get me near the three-quarters mark for another domestic off peak reward trip. I should have more than enough by the middle of February for a domestic off-peak trip.

Preparation

Many of the links to specific tourist attractions and other useful links are included below in the travel log, but I thought I would note four books that I read before I left. The most useful book was the Mini Rough Guide to London — a mini-guide that could fit in my pocket easily and be carried everywhere we went. I also took Lonely planet’s London (condensed), and the Lonely planet British Phrasebook–although I never really took the time to read it there. I also read Culture Shock! Living in the World’s Greatest Cities: London. Neat book, but I didn’t need to carry it. Quite frankly, next time I’ll only carry the mini rough guide.

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