Off to Cabo
Mrs. SFO777 and I are off today for a quick two day trip to Cabo San Lucas. Summer is certainly not the most pleasant time of the year to visit Cabo, but it's one of our good friend's 60th birthday and we're on our way to join the party and celebration. Fortunately, Alaska has a five days a week Orange County to Cabo nonstop. Even better since they are operating a Virgin America configured A319.
This plane had the first generation VX seats, but still very comfortable especially on a short two hour flight.
Excellent service today including pre-departure open bar service. And after take-off, a breakfast smoothie and my first of two Bloody Marys.
Breakfast today was a choice of yogurt and granola, or breakfast sandwich. There was only one breakfast sandwich left by the time our flight attendant got to our seats, so we were stuck with one of each. Unfortunately, the yogurt was disgusting and inedible.
The breakfast sandwich looked much better...
... and was very tasty. My half as we split it.
The BOB Economy Cheese Platter from Economy was still available... for $8.50...
... and unlike the yogurt was edible and refreshing.
I guess this sounded cool 10 years ago.
And then there was endless parade of Economy pax to the First Class lav. IME, Virgin America crews were pretty good about restricting lav access. Alaska? Not so much. Indeed the VX cabin divider rope was still there, hanging useless as Alaska continues to not care about who uses the F lav.
On descent to SJD.
We pulled into the gate ontime at 1:15pm MST.
The deceiving deserted walk to customs.
Looking good.
But whoa Nellie. At the bottom of the escalator, the customs arrival hall... with 1,000 or so of our closest friends from 4 or 5 flights that beat us to the terminal. Nary a single person in the Mexican, pregnant and handicapped passport line but a mass of humanity in the Foreign passport line. No idea what they were, but there were a bunch of kiosks on the other side of the rope against the left wall with no signage as to purpose. I asked a security person whether Global Entry members could use them and was told no. OK, not sure about that as all sorts of people started using them, eventually resulting in an even slower line on the left side of the hall. In the end, It took 50 minutes to get to one of 6 manned booths out of 20 or so.
As if 50 minutes for customs wasn't bad enough, we then had to queue for random incoming bag check. Not surprisingly, we got a red light and wasted another few minutes before exiting customs and entering time share central.
Outside, to tent position #4 and our pre-arranged ride.
