Holiday Road
Some of the great modern day stories come from people trying to get home for the holidays. Here in the U.S. there are really five holiday seasons that really matter. The first is the Christmas/Hanukkah break that is usually considered to include the New Years holiday. The second and most uniquely American holiday in the Thanksgiving holiday. Canadians also have a Thanksgiving holiday, but it occurs about almost two months before its American cousin. The other three major holidays in the U.S. all occur in what we think of as the summer. In mid-summer there is the Independence Day or July 4th holiday around the 4th of July, obviously. The remaining two are the bookends between which what we think of as the summer vacation season takes place. Those are the Labor Day holiday which happens on the first Monday of September demarcates what we call the “Back to School” time and is the federal holiday meant to celebrate the American labor movement. And the remaining holiday is the Memorial Day holiday, which falls on the last Monday in May and is the federal holiday that honors the fallen veterans of the country (originally called Decoration Day). All three of these summer holidays are days that are considered very patriotic and for which people generally use to fly the flag as a sign of respect.
The other common element of all of these holidays is that they are times for family to gather and therefore to travel near or far to get together. Therein lies the basis of the fun and games that ensue around traveling during any of these holiday periods. I do not have firm statistics on the relative travel volumes on these five holidays, but I feel it is safe to say that the least busy travel holiday is the Memorial Day holiday. There are several reasons for that, but mostly, I think it has to do with the fact that Memorial Day fall both before the warmth of the summer season hits hard in most places around the country and perhaps the even more significant reason is that school ends on various dates, but mostly colleges end earlier than Memorial Day and elementary and high schools usually end much later in June. So, if families are going to skip the gathering process for any holiday, I suggest that Memorial Day gets that designation. The exception to this may be if the family has one or more veterans who have fallen and who the family wants to honor. Along those lines, based on the number of veterans that ride Harley Davidson motorcycles, they especially seem to like to gather for what are called rumble tours as show of support for their fellow veterans.
Due to the slow-playing of this arbitration case that has me in Des Moines, Iowa for the week, I was not able to get out on a flight on Wednesday evening as initially planned. Once my attorneys and I determined that my testimony would not take place in the first three days of the week, I shifted my flights back to Friday morning at 6am (never a particularly popular time for people to travel) that had me flying from Des Moines to Chicago and then on to San Diego, getting in there at mid-morning thanks to the time zone changes. Yesterday, once I finally got on the stand to testify, it became increasingly clear as the afternoon dragged on that while the direct questioning by my attorney would wrap up rather crisply leaving what I hoped would be enough time for the cross-examination by opposing counsel, I might not finish my testimony on Thursday as hoped. Sure enough, once the opposing counsel laid into me and my background trying to discredit me as best they could, it became more and more clear that we would no conclude on Thursday.
When, indeed, we didn’t finish, I quickly placed a call into he airline to seek to change my flights, knowing full well that it would be costly and difficult. When I changed my flight on Tuesday to early Friday morning, I was able to do it online with relative ease and a modest cost of $160, so it wasn’t particularly hard to accomplish. I could tell right away that I was in a holiday travel traffic jam right away. To begin with, I was unable to make the change online as I had been before. The system was telling me to call American Airlines to make any changes. The reason was ostensibly the short timeframe prior to the flight, but I suspect the reality was the much higher volume of travel was the bigger issue. When I called, I got a voicemail telling me that is was a 22-23 minute wait for a representative and that the airline was offering to call me when a representative was available. I felt I had no choice, so I went about wandering back to my hotel, awaiting a call from the airline.
Sure enough, about 23 minutes later I got a call and after working my way through another automated call handling system, got to a representative who listened to my issue and went about looking to make the required changes. The first thing she told me was that a flight at the earliest time a suggested, which was 1pm was available, but at a change price of $1,200. That flight went through Chicago, so I would actually be backtracking from Des Moines. When she and I agreed that was ridiculously high priced, she went back and rooted around until she found the 6pm flight to San Diego via Phoenix. That is the exact same flight configuration I had originally booked for Wednesday night and the really good news was that it would cost me nothing to make the change. I am by training on Wall Street, an arbitrageur and I don’t get the $1,200 price spread between the two alternatives since I would get into San Diego only about 2 hours later, but airline pricing is hardly something I think is worth wasting my time trying to figure out, so I let it pass and booked the flight change.
The next thing was to change the airport cab reservation. In theory I didn’t really need to go until about 3:30, but I chose to go off the clock at 1pm when the morning session ended. At my hourly rate, I didn’t think it was good value for the clients to pay me for the added 2.5 hours just to listen to the opposition counsel cross examine the regulatory expert for our side that went on after I finished in the mid-morning. He and I had gotten friendly over the week, so I had some interest in hearing his testimony, which very much built on mine, but there was no value to me or the client to spend a few hours when the opposition counsel used him to get more point they wanted to get across to the panel. There was little they could have assailed his expert status on since he had spent 25 years at the SEC and been retained by the SEC over 50 times as an expert on issues exactly like what he was attesting to for these clients. Unlike me, who had gone and done battle on Wall Street and had several scars to prove it, this fellow had spent his life in the rarefied air of the federal bureaucracy when bumps and bruises at the staff level are rare.
So, instead I caught the Marriott airport shuttle at no added cost and saved my clients the expense of another taxi ride. I am also here at the airport several extra hours early, which suits me just fine. Obviously I am hoping that this flight takes me on-time into Phoenix and that with my scheduled 54 minute layover in Phoenix I will be just fine with my ongoing flight to San Diego, where an Uber will await my arrival. I am now officially on the Holiday Road, so I’ll see where it goes from here.