On my way to Las Vegas, I had a stop at IAH to switch over to a 757-300 scheduled to depart at 5:35PM.

My flight from PHL got in a bit early so I had time to leisurely enjoy the sprawling amalgamation of terminals to check on the 3:45PM departure to Las Vegas. While the gate agent there acknowledged my original flight would likely be oversold, she couldn’t process me as a volunteer thereby entitled to even the slightest compensation nor could I obtain anything better than a middle seat somewhere in the back of the plane. I declined and headed over to my original flight’s gate, now delayed to a 6:38PM departure due to a late arriving aircraft:

Unsurprisingly, once the podium was staffed, they sought out volunteers. Unlike United which generally offers a flat $400 in travel vouchers, Continental was offering $250 and a ticket for the 9:00PM departure. I’m seeing Penn & Teller tonight, so I was hoping for something a bit higher to convince me to miss the show and give up my first class seat.

This flight had a full vegetarian dinner available: Cheese ravoli with marinara, salad, and minestrone soup.

The meal was rounded out by blueberry cheesecake.

Just under two weeks ago, I was looking around to figure out what I would be doing memorial day weekend. A few friends from college were going to be driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas for the weekend and I decided it would be fun to join them.

When I was booking my trip, the only inexpensive way of getting there from the New York area was out of Philadelphia marketed by Continental (but oddly not United). Since then, there was a brief, now-gone sale out of NYC to LAS on most major carriers earlier this week. I had never flown in or out of PHL and figured it would be a good learning experience to familiarize myself with how easily I could get from midtown Manhattan to catch a flight. While today I had the leisure of departing at 12:30PM on a Saturday, it’s helpful to know the route before trying this on a Friday evening.

For the more gory technical details: I booked into a “K” fare on my outbound trip and an “L” fare on my inbound segments. Both had provided the routing PHL-WAS/PHL/EWR/CLT/CLE/CHI-HOU/DEN/CHI-SFO/LAX-LAS. Today, I’m traveling to Las Vegas via Houston. Tomorrow, I’m returning via LAX, ORD, and EWR, then using the Continental-sold Amtrak code share to get to Philadelphia.

For my first segment, I’m on a Continental 737-800. My upgrades to first class cleared 72 hours prior to departure for all five of my flight segments.

While not entirely obvious from the angle of the photo, there’s about 10 inches of room between my knee and the seat in front of me.

Since I was only flying out of PHL, I couldn’t get a full vegetarian lunch on this flight. Between a choice of a chicken sandwich and a chicken salad that the flight attendents could simply skip adding the chicken, I went with the salad.