NOTE -> This trip occurred pre-COVID-19 and feels like 100 years ago

Getaway days are hard, especially when we have an early evening flight. It didn’t help that it was rainy and cold out and work was especially busy. We couldn’t wait to leave.

Separate Lyfts

My wife had a meeting in the city that wasn’t going to get out in time for her to meet us back at the house so we decided to go directly from her meeting to the airport. I’d schedule a separate Lyft to pick us up after the kids got home from school.

The night before I signed my wife up for Lyft Pink which is a new benefit of her Sapphire Reserve card. With that she gets 15% off each ride among other perks. I also have it as a benefit on my Sapphire Reserve but the benefit appears to only last one year so I’ll wait until next year before activating it on my account and use her account for Lyfts until then.

Our Lyft arrived on time and we made it to the airport relatively quickly with only some rush hour traffic in the last couple of miles to the airport. The airport itself was pretty congested and it didn’t help that the driver missed the turn for the dropoff point so we had to go around a second time.

Checkin

We met my wife at the terminal and she had already scouted out where the checking counter was. There was a 20 minute line for Iberia/Level. Only needed to drop off bags and it was unclear if there was a faster line we could have used to do that since I had filled out the forms and checked in online. Luckily it took less than 5 minutes once we reached the front of the line to get everything sorted out checking our bags and get our boarding passes printed out.

We then headed off to terminal C to get dinner at Jerry Remy’s Bar and Grill for what has become our traditional Priority Pass dinner before international flights. We took advantage of the $112 in food and drink credit to apply towards our bill. The waiter actually checked our boarding passes which is stated in the rules but had never actually been done before. The meal was excellent and filling!

Security and Boarding

We went through security in Terminal C to avoid some of the chaos we usually see in terminal E which has a very cramped security area. Since the terminals are connected we can use either one to get in.

Since Iberia and its subsidiary, Level, does NOT participate in PreCheck we couldn’t go through the faster line. This was the first time in a long time that we had to take all our electronics out.

While there weren’t too many people going through security, we unfortunately picked the slow lane. It took us 20 minutes to get through and we didn’t have enough time to visit the Air France lounge we usually enjoy before flights. We only have a few minutes to wait before boarding would begin.

I spent the little time we had to try to get the SIM cards installed and configured on our phones so they would work when we landed. It didn’t go as smoothly as it had in the past. The instructions online didn’t work but I was eventually able to enter the configuration information manually. I think newer versions of iOS cause the instructions to break and they hadn’t updated them. At least I got it working and was able to verify things work before boarding began.

Boarding began shortly after we arrived. We were in group A which was unexpected. Maybe it’s because we had kids because we didn’t pay extra for that. The boarding areas was cramped and everyone was trying to board at once. We had to push our ways to the front in order to board with our group.

The plane itself was LEVEL which is a subsidiary of Iberia, though most people likely didn’t know that. We didn’t know we were flying LEVEL instead of Iberia until we were at the ticket counter. In the end it didn’t really matter as long as we had seats.

We got on near the beginning of boarding and found our seats (2+2) near the front of the economy section. There was a premium economy or extra legroom section in the very front of the plane but no business or first class.

As soon as we sat down the boys started search through the entertainment system. It had a small selection of movies and shows, but enough for a short flights. I turned my screen all the way off and got ready to sleep as much as I could.

During the flight I got about 2 hours of restless sleep-like naps in and tried to get the kids to do the same. It was tough with such an early flight (6:30pm). It’s easier to sleep on the later flights but my rule with all red-eyes it to sleep as much as you can and power through the next day without a nap in order to set yourself up to be in your destination time zone.

The flight was bumpy at times but arrived about 30 minutes ahead of schedule. My wife got more sleep than the rest of us combined but we were all pretty dazed when we arrived. I’m not sure the boys got any sleep so it was setting up for a long day.