Departure Day

After 2 tumultuous days of helping Jeff move, topped off by a fantastic night in the pit on a Broadway show sitting next to my trombone teacher, and Jeff playing 2nd trumpet sitting directly behind me, it is finally time to leave.
We actually had a cabbie who didn’t make us sick. No constant flooring it followed immediately by hard braking. It was a relaxing traffic free ride to JFK.
We were teased with the possibility of an upgrade to 1st class but unfortunately coach was not oversold. We are, however, in the best seats in coach, which on the Delta 767-300ER are the second exit row and we have more leg room than most Delta domestic first class seats. We boarded in Zone 2, took our seats, and got comfortable before all the amateur travelers came onboard. I decided to take a picture so I got out of my seat and heard the loud tearing sound and I knew I destroyed my shirt. Some jackass on a previous flight broke the audio connector and left the sharp metal prongs sticking out. My shirt got caught and now has a large tear. I did get a $100 travel voucher for my troubles.
After a short 40 minutes on the ground following an almost on-time pushback, we were off. At 10,000 feet Jeff pulled out the GPS so we could track our ground speed. It was pretty funny watching the little car on the scream pass streets and highways at 600+mph. I took a video and will someday post it to FB or YouTube.

We just heard that we may land 1 ½ hours early in AMS. Time to eat. More in a bit.

Hmm, tasty meal. Small salad, BBQ chicken, mashed, green beans, brownie, and of course a beer. Since we are on our way to Holland we each had a Heineken.
Our 170mph tail wind and 700mph ground speed has each gone done 100mph. Due to this we arrived 80 minutes early at 4:40am AMS time. We attempt to get into one of the premium lounges and were denied by each. I placed a call to Amex Platinum and found out their any airline club in the world is no longer valid and they don’t have a club in AMS, one of the largest airports in Europe. Time to cancel that card and the large annual fee!

We weren’t allowed to change planes to an earlier flight (there were 2) because we had bags in transit so we had the joy of wandering Schipol. We found a fabulous quite area with chaise lounge chairs with only a couple of other people around. Jeff celebrated being in Holland with a couple of Heinekens for breakfast.