Travails of travel when living in rural America are commonplace but it clearly isn’t in any busy person, one with a defined schedule to fly out of North Bend. Friday, my 5:00 flight to San Francisco with a connection on to San Diego was delayed due to weather at SFO. Jets, it seems, were able to land in the city but small propeller planes like the Skywest service from North Bend were denied permission to leave the airport owing to cloud cover and foggy conditions. A similarly timed flight from Eugene was able to take off and land in SFO but I heard some flights were delayed leaving so I may still not have arrived in San Diego late Friday.
A Saturday night dinner at the haunted Hotel del Coronado required I make it to San Diego before 6PM so I thought leaving North Bend on Friday should have allowed enough time. In the end I arrived in San Diego a little before 1PM on Saturday, twenty hours after stepping foot in the $30M South Western Oregon Regional Airport and after paying for a room in Portland and barely five hours in advance of the dinner. Now, here I sit in San Diego Airport, the victim of a mechanical malfunction this time and returning to North Bend is the most limiting factor on rescheduling a flight home… If I had flown out of Eugene or Portland I would have arrived sooner and be home already including the car ride from either airport.
For someone with a fixed schedule, I am going to miss two meetings today, it is just too risky to depend on flying into and out of North Bend.
