Tag: Love Field

DESTINATIONS, Road Trips, TRAVEL, United States

Getting Our Arizona Fun on Early

Jane Sadek
Love Field, Southwest Airlines
Early Risers

TRAVEL THERE:  UP WITH THE CHICKENS

So, remember how Southwest Airlines sent me an email with cheap airfare.  To get to our destination with the cheapest fares, we either had to be on a plane at 6 AM or virtually lose the first day to travel.  So, I convinced Bill Arizona was worth getting up for.  Here’s how it went.

There’s Early and Then There’s Really Early

The alarm went off at 2:15 AM.  I rolled out of bed.  Bill rolled out at 2:40.  By 3:15 AM the car was backing out of the garage.  No, it was not fun, but we were determined to make the best of it.

At Love Field, since it was raining, Bill unloaded me and the luggage at the terminal and went off to find parking.  I dragged the luggage into the terminal and stood by it, praying to the travel gods that Bill would navigate the parking lot and get back to me.  Parking lots are not his favorite thing in the world and I didn’t want to start the trip off on the wrong foot.

He returned and we set about trying to figure out what was next.  When you’re flying, there’s always a bunch of people who seem to know exactly what they are doing.  This is particularly true in a Southwest terminal.  Their customers are more like a cult than anything else.  I was frantically trying to read every sign I could see and Bill was watching the crowd.  We sort of captured the rhythm of the system and ended up in front of one of the ticketing machines.

We failed miserably.  The self-help machine treated us just like the infrequent, senior-citizen, not-Southwest flyers that we are.  Somehow we managed to press the right buttons to find our reservations and get our luggage tags, but we didn’t end up with boarding passes.

A Southwest employee quickly identified us as inept and came to our rescue.  With boarding passes she procured, we were able to progress to the bag check.  That’s when we discovered my other ooops.  I had attached both luggage bags to one bag and none to the other.  It was more than early.  It was really early!

Still, this trip made me fall back in love with Southwest, though we hadn’t flown them in years.  Thanks to their liberal baggage limits, we were able to check all three bags, rather than trot around dragging a carry-on.  I had everything I needed for being in transit in a small backpack.   I felt like screaming, “Free at last.  Free at last.”

What Bill really thought about waking up so early

Getting There

In truth, I think we could have slept for another hour, but we didn’t realize that.  For years we’ve been fighting the battle out a DFW.  Southwest can’t get you to the Mediterranean, Egypt and the Danube and international has been our focus for years.  Besides, it’ only been in recent years that Southwest was freed from the Wright Amendment, making flying them from Dallas a better proposition.  I think Southwest will be seeing a whole lot more of us, especially since we’re abandoning the International scene for a while, to catch up on some American destinations.

The flight was blissfully uneventful and arrived on time.  We made our way to the rental shuttle and were delivered to the Alamo facility.  That’s when our luck really kicked in.  There on the appointed row, among Hyundais, and Toyotas stood a Jeep – a Jeep with four while drive! He went back to the attendant and confirmed the Jeep was truly one of our options.

We just knew this was going to be a magical trip.  Sure we’d had to get up early, it was raining in Dallas and we’d had a little trouble at the ticket kiosk, but even with those little hiccups we’d had smooth sailing and we had no reason to think it would change.  One of my blogging friends accuses me of making up our little dramas to make my blogs sound more exciting.  Well, we’ll see, because this trip was breeze – not a single headache to report.  I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Come back next week and we’ll have breakfast in one of the Phoenix area’s top ten breakfast spots.

ART, Attractions, DESTINATIONS, DFW Metroplex, Museums, Presidential, Road Trips, TRAVEL

JFK in Dallas

Jane Sadek

PRIMARILY PRESIDENTIAL DESTINATIONS:  DALLAS IS MORE THAN A JFK DESTINATION

Welcome to the fifteenth  installment of Primarily Presidential Destinations. We’ve covered almost all of the Presidential destinations that I’ve visited, but we haven’t talked about Dallas.  I live in Dallas now, but my family lived in Georgia when Kennedy was shot in Dealey Plaza.  Like most Dallasites I try to disassociate my city from the assassination, but we can’t quite shake it.

Love Field

Love Field no longer looks anything like it did when the dazzling Kennedys stepped onto the tarmac.  When I think of Love Field, my mind is more likely to run to hot pants by Pucci than a First Lady in a pink suit.  Sure I remember the black and white photos, but Braniff landed there a lot more times than Airforce One.  I never greeted a president at Love Field, but I welcomed the Dallas Cowboys outside the Braniff terminal after many an away game- whether we had won or lost.

The JFK Sites

If you live here, visitors are going to ask about Dealey Plaza, the Texas School Book Depository and Parkland Hospital, but I always discourage them.  From Dealy Plaza you can gaze at the infamous grassy knoll, but you can’t drive the route JFK did, because traffic in front of the old courthouse flows one way in the wrong direction.  You can find Parkland Hospital, but you’d never find anything in the huge complex, remodeled several times over, that even remotely reminded you of the hospital in those old news clips.

There’s an old building across from Dealey Plaza that was the Texas School Book Depository.  It’s been through several incarnations, but the infamous window is still there.  Inside there’s something called The Sixth Floor Museum.  Some guy bought up some of the contents of the Depository and several people went broke trying to make money off of them.   Apparently the current manifestation of the museum is the most successful, but it’s a good thing they have tourists to depend on, because even Dallas school teachers don’t want to take their students.

 

A block or so away from Dealey Plaza is a big square piece of concrete that is a memorial to the assassinated president.  It embarrasses me a little bit.  If a guest does insist that they must see where Kennedy was shot, I will drive them by Dealey Plaza and the Book Depository, but I never allow enough time to see the Sixth Floor Museum and I never point out the memorial.  It looks like an abandoned building project – blank walls and no ceiling.  If we were going to have a memorial to him, it should have looked more like Dealey Plaza – columns, a statue, lots of grass.  Maybe a waterfall or something, but not the empty concrete walls on a slab of concrete behind a red brick courthouse.

There’s so much more to see and do in Dallas.  Dallas didn’t kill John F. Kennedy.  Maybe it was Lee Harvey Oswald.  Maybe it was the Mafia.  Maybe it was aliens.  But it wasn’t Dallas.  For that matter, we didn’t shoot JR either, but I’ll save that for another day.

Come to Dallas to shop.  Redecorate your digs in the Design District.  Eat at our restaurants.  See the Dallas Museum of Art, The Meadows Museum, The Crow Collection of Asian Art, The Nasher  or any number of museums besides the Sixth Floor.  Catch an opera, symphony or show in the Arts District.  There a lot to do, but don’t waste time on an event we’re working so hard to ignore.