Here is a narrative and some photos from a trip that I took from January 11th through the 14th to visit Portland State University--the grad school that I want to go to for my masters of urban and regional analysis.
The photos can be seen here.
...and without further adieu, I present to you:
"Four Airports and Three Airlines Later:
A Tale of Rapid Pacific Northwest Exploration"
My journey to Portland started at about eight o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, the 11th. I was heading up there to visit Portland State University—the graduate school where I wish to go—and to see the see and region itself. My friend Andrew, who I used to work with, went with me because he has family that lives there and also because that meant I would have a free place to sleep. So Andrew and his girlfriend Tamara picked me up from my apartment at 8:00am on that Tuesday and we drove to the airport where Tamara dropped us both off. We checked in quickly and went through security like a breeze; that took all of, maybe, fifteen minutes. We arrived at the gate a bit early, so I had a Matt’s El Rancho breakfast taco while we waited. We finally boarded the plane and took off at 9:15am.
Now I should take this time to explain my flight reservations. I had been planning this trip for a while, because PSU is really the only school I want to go to, so I wanted to make it up there to not only experience the school and city, but to also allow the faculty—including the chair of the admissions committee, whom I had been in close e-mail contact with—to get to know me. I was after the cheapest airline fare, being the poor college student that I am. I checked out Southwest Airlines’ website, Expedia, and Orbitz. As some of you know, Southwest does not advertise on either of these last two websites. I found that I could actually fly more economically on American Airlines through Orbitz than I could on Southwest. So I looked on American’s website for more detailed flight information and stumbled upon an even cheaper fare than I had seen on any of the other websites. The one catch was that I had to transfer planes in San Jose from an American Airlines Super 80 to an Alaska Airlines 737 (Alaska has a code-sharing agreement with American). The layovers in San Jose, however, were not more than an hour and a half, so I went with that option.
Upon landing in San Jose, we were informed that contrary to what we had been told, we would have to exit security, get on a bus to another terminal, go back through security, and then we could be at our gate. We went to the bus area, saw a bus that went to where we were going, and got on…and we waited…and waited… When the bus finally started moving and drove us to the terminal, we realized that it would have been faster if we had walked. We went up to security in this other terminal, which was, incidentally, the old, old, old San Jose Airport. Whereas in Austin we merely took the things out of our pockets and walked through, the security agents here made us take our belts and shoes off and spent about three times as long looking at our possessions with the x-ray machine. After that checkpoint, we were in the terminal. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 12:03pm PST. It was about 11:30am, but since we came from the CST, it was 1:30pm for us and we were hungry. As soon as we had walked through security, we saw that we were in a terminal with two gates and maybe fifty people waiting for their flights.
We heard our names called over the intercom and went to the gate counter. The attendant (who was the terminal supervisor for that airline, by the way) told us that since the flight was so empty, they would need to move us to keep the weight distribution even on the airplane. We agreed and were issued new boarding passes. Now let me change the format of this prose for a moment to a bulleted list to better illustrate the upcoming series of events.
• 11:30am: We entered the terminal
• 11:35am: We left the counter with our new boarding passes.
• 11:36am: We stood in line at a sandwich counter approximately 40 feet from the gate.
• 11:40am: The plane was supposed to start boarding. We knew the plane was almost empty, so we took our time and went to the bathroom.
• 11:48am: We walked up to the gate and noticed that there were very few people around. The woman (the supervisor, mind you) said “THERE YOU ARE! I’ve been paging you for about fifteen minutes! The plane has already pushed back, you missed it.”
• 11:49am: I look out the window and the plane is still there, I mention this, and the woman says there is nothing she can do. The planes always push back ten minutes early.
TIME OUT: Math lesson!
12:03 – 10 minutes = 11:53, not some time before 11:48
TIME IN!
• 11:55am: The woman prints us new boarding passes for the next flight to Seattle, Washington and then a connecting flight to Portland from Seattle. This flight leaves in about thirty minutes. “Go straight over there; it will leave ten minutes early, too.”
• 12:03pm: Our original plane was supposed to have pulled back from the gate.
So, we’re going to Seattle! The question that keeps entering my mind, is why advertise a flight as leaving at one time, when it will always leave ten minutes early? Anyway, we were now on a McDonald-Douglas MD-80 heading towards Seattle. I had a question about where my luggage would end up, so I asked one of the flight attendants. I told her why I didn’t make my original flight, and she was surprised. She said that it was against regulations to push back early unless every single passenger was on board and that I should file a complaint. She offered us complimentary drinks.
Upon arriving in Seattle, we had about 45 minutes between flights. We went to the gate that we were supposed to depart from, only to realize that we were not flying on an American or Alaska flight, but on a Horizon Airlines flight (all three of these airlines are in partnerships). We got there early enough, in fact, to be in time for a flight departing earlier than ours, which had been delayed for almost an hour. We made it on that plane as two of about 20 passengers. This plane, however, was a Bombardier Q400…a bit different than our original Super 80. The plane had 70 seats, none of which reclined, and all of the passengers, save three, were seated at the back because of the pilot’s weight distribution request. The flight was actually quite pleasant. While the plane was a propeller driven puddle jumper, it was at least a Turbo-Prop (jet engines with propellers, as opposed to piston engines). Incidentally, the plane did not have drop-down oxygen masks.
The flight attendants on this plane were really friendly and were just having a blast with each other and with the passengers. The highlights of the flight were that we were able to see Mt. Hood and Mt. Saint Helens (for the second time in three hours) quite well and we were served complimentary micro-brew beer called “Snow Plow” from Widmer Breweries. It looked like espresso. Good stuff.
We finally arrived in Portland at about 4:00pm CST after about nine hours of travel time. We quickly gathered our bags from the carousel; mine, of course, had a hole torn in it. We made our way to the MAX train downstairs at about 4:15 and took it to the Sunset transit center where my friend’s aunt would be picking us up. Speaking of sunset, the sun going down at 4:30pm was really odd to me. Andrew’s aunt picked us up and drove us to their split level semi-suburban house in Hillsboro. The family is made up of the mom, dad, and two girls in third and fourth grade. Andrew and I were both tired, so after watching “Without a Paddle” with Andrew’s aunt and uncle, we went to sleep in their basement rec-room.
Andrew slept on a couch that kept falling over. His uncle had decided it was too low when he sat on it, so he propped it up on blocks, but every time someone moved, the legs slid off of the blocks and everyone did a back flip into a book shelf. I slept on a futon with a very thin mattress. To compensate, Andrew’s aunt placed odd-sized couch cushions under my mattress; it was like trying to sleep on a tree limb.
The next morning, we woke up at 7:45 or so. I had a meeting with a professor on campus at 9:30, so I needed to be on the MAX by about 8:45. After waiting on everyone to get ready, I got on the MAX at about 9:00. The only problem was that I had never been to Portland before and didn’t know for sure where I was going. I was, however, equipped with a visitor’s map, and thanks to my geography classes and my good navigation skills, I got off at the right stop and walked about six or seven blocks to the place I was supposed to be. I was only about five minutes late. I met with one of the heads of the Urban and Regional Planning department—which is the department that I am applying to—and discussed the program, the city, and my back ground (plus my pesky little GPA). He said that he thought I was a strong candidate and that my GPA shouldn’t be much of a problem, especially since I did well on the GRE.
After a while, he decided that I should meet another faculty, one whose first degree was also in geography. I talked with this gentleman for about 45 minutes, which was mostly spent discussing my thesis. He was very interested in the economics of the report and since he wasn’t familiar with Texas, he was asking me a lot of geography-related questions. My thesis, by the way, was on high speed rail in Texas. After that, I called my friend who came to meet me downtown. We walked around Pioneer Square for a bit, then down towards campus along Broadway and Park streets. During this time and while I was waiting on him to show up, I walked around downtown and saw a lot of very interesting buildings and other design aspects of the city. I made it a point to go see Michael Graves’ Portland Building and the new courthouse building. We ended up walking back to the Urban Center building which is where my meetings were and ate at the Pizzicato on the ground floor. One really neat thing about the city, if you have never been, is the mixed land use of most areas and the transit integration into the design and layout of the city. The street car, in fact, runs right through the middle of the Urban Center building.
After lunch we decided to drive out to the coast and see Cannon Beach. The drive was nice and took us up through the coastal range mountains where we saw snow and tall evergreens and back down to sea level where all of the beach areas are. Cannon Beach was a beautiful place with its rock out-cropping (terrain accretion) and clean beaches. This was the first time I had seen the Pacific, so I took a mussel shell from the beach as a souvenir. The town itself was very quaint and enjoyable. Adding to the surprise of no sales tax and the law that one cannot pump their own gas (only full service!) was the fact that, at least according to the gas station attendant, the city leaders had decided not to allow any chain store, gas stations, restaurants, etc. into their town.
We drove back to Portland after buying some Salmon Jerky (weird) and experienced driving through snow mountain roads at night in a rental car. I had a class that I wanted to sit in on at 6:40pm, so Andrew dropped me off and went back to his aunt’s house. The class was Transportation and Land Use and was very interesting. It is a second-year graduate course, so some of the material was a bit unfamiliar to me, but I followed along with most of it. It was good to see the classroom discussion and interaction that I could expect, and I was delighted to see that all of the students call the faculty members by their first names.
After class, Andrew came back downtown and we went to some sports bar type place and had some dinner and some Oregon beer (McTarnahan’s and something else…that it was a port is all that I can remember of it). After this we went back to the house and crashed. During all of these trips we were taking the streetcar and the MAX. I was very impressed with the service compared to the DART in Dallas, which is the only comparison that I can really make. The DART is not as efficient, but does have the advantage that it shares very few roadways with other traffic, unlike the MAX which has its own lanes, but still has cars running parallel and turning across the tracks.
The next day I rode the MAX back downtown and had another meeting with a faculty member. After this meeting Andrew came and met me and we ate at Jake’s Restaurant. We had a $2.95 Calamari appetizer, which was pretty large for its price. Andrew ate a BBQ salmon filet and I had pan-fried oysters. We then walked around and did some shopping. At 4pm I went to another class, Transportation: Policy and Problems, and participated in a group exercise that the professor assigned during class. It was informative about the knowledge of other students. The assignment was to discuss congestions: who it affects, how to measure it, how to compare to other cities and regions, etc. It was an encouraging experience, because I had some ideas that the others in my group didn’t think of and, from what I understand, had never considered before. After class, Andrew came back downtown (he got his share of the MAX) and we went up to the Pearl District and walked around. We ended up eating at some Thai restaurant up there, whose name I cannot remember, but it was very good.
Friday morning I woke up and went to campus for the last time during the trip. Andrew had an earlier flight than me, so he returned the car and went ahead to the airport. I turned in all of my applications this morning and then went to meet with a faculty member that I have had the most contact with who is also the chair of the admissions committee. It was a good experience and she asked about my specific interests and discussed graduate research assistantships with me. Other than that, we made small talk and got to know each other a little bit. We then both went to the weekly Friday transportation seminar where a PhD student was giving a presentation that he had given at the Transportation Research Board seminar in Washington D.C. a few days earlier. It was on Automated Passenger Counters, particularly related to TriMet (Portland’s transit system), and their accuracy. It was very informative and was on a subject I knew nothing about.
As soon as this seminar was over, I grabbed my suitcase and jumped on the MAX redline bound for the airport. After arriving, I went through the check-in procedure quickly and headed to security. After the first guard checked my boarding pass she said “Please follow me,” and led me to a much shorter line. “Alright!” I thought, “Short line.” Well, as it turns out, I am supposedly terrorist material and had been flagged by the airlines as a possible threat. They had me take off everything but my shirt and pants and walk through the metal detector, which did not go off. After that, they made me sit down while they “wanded” my legs, then they had me stand up while the man wanded my entire body twice (even though I had made it through the big detector fine). There was a slight blip when he went by the metal studs on my jeans and made me roll the waist band down so he could feel me up. Then he patted me down on the front side and back side and went through all of my coat pockets and my backpack. After about 15 minutes of this I was through and went to my gate. My plane has been delayed….great…now my hour and a half layover in San Jose which involved that terminal change and veritable hike across the airport would be only an hour long.
When I finally got to the right terminal and to the security area, I saw an amazing site. 300-400 people in line for security. My plane was leaving in 45 minutes. When I flew to London, I went through customs more quickly than this security check. I don’t know if anyone reading this has ever been to the San Jose airport, but it is arranged more vertically than horizontally and has close spaces with very few windows. The line wound down two hallways and up a ramp that wound around an elevator shaft for a couple of stories. I really felt like I was at the slaughter house. The line moved relatively quickly and I got to the security checkpoint about 25 minutes before my plane was supposed to take off. I thought I was home free, but hey, guess what! ONCE AGAIN, I am pulled aside to be felt up by some guy in a poorly fitting uniform and black Reebok sneakers. This time, however, there was no short line, I had had to wait in the long line like everyone else and when the time came for my unwanted security massage, and they had to try to find someone from another checkpoint to come “assist” me. The guy at least had a sense of humor and was very surprised when I told him that this was the second time in three hours that this had happened to me. After I sat down and raised my leg (and did other things which displayed that I knew exactly what to do and had done this before) he was a little more lax and didn’t insist on rubbing the area below my waist like the other guy had.
Now it’s a mere 10 or so minutes before my flight is supposed to take off, so I run from one end of the terminal to the other. Luckily, the people in charge of boarding had their heads as far up their asses as the security people and boarding was still going very slowly. I got on the plane and sat next to a man in the computer business that makes the trip from Austin to San Jose and back twice a month. He called this flight the “nerd bird” because about 95% of the people on it were in the technology business. He agreed that San Jose was the worst airport in the world.
Well, I finally made it back to Austin…early, actually; we had a good tailwind. The trip was very fun and informative and helped me to see what going to school in Portland would be like. I visited three stated for the first time, one of them—Washington—by accident. I saw some neat things and met some nice people. I also learned that our security measures really are ridiculous and that one should never, ever, ever fly through San Jose International Airport if they can avoid it.
