San Francisco to Minneapolis

I had to leave relatively early this morning to catch my flight to Minneapolis.  I decided to rely on the number 30 bus, as I knew where to catch it and I knew that even in the worst-case rush hour traffic, it would take no more than an hour to get to Market Street where I could get on the BART at Powell station for the trip to the airport.  I got on very near the start of the route, but the bus was already busy and become very heavily packed.

The journey to the airport was fine, although my flight changed terminal, so after queueing for 20 minutes in terminal 3 in the hugely long priority access queue that looked like it would take at least an hour and wondering if I was going to actually get through in time, I had to dash over to International Terminal G instead (presumably, because the plane had arrived from Mexico earlier in the morning).  Fortunately, the queue was much shorter there, although security decided they did want to search my little bag for no apparent reason.

 The flight was OK, except for the chicken salad debacle.  There were 12 seats in First Class, and of the lunch choices, they only had 2 chicken salads.  So everybody was being offered the chicken salad, some spicy chicken curry thing or pasta, and when they chose the salad, being told there might not be any.  Fortunately, I got one of them.  It also came with tomato soup and a roll, which was nice.

I arrived at Minneapolis-St Paul airport mid-afternoon and travelled into the centre of Minneapolis to find my hotel, which is just a couple of blocks away from the metro stop.

My room here is on the top floor, on a corner again, so I have windows on two sides.  When I first entered the room, I thought it was quite small, as the kitchen area was right in front of me and the bed to the left, but as I went in further, I found the room went on and on around the corner.


And I even have a walk-in closet for all my clothes to hang in.

Afterwards, I went to the travel centre to buy a GoTo card (to increase my smartcard collection again) as I can put a multi-trip pass on it plus some stored money without needing to pay $2.25 by credit card every time I want to travel, which costs me a lot more on the currency fees.