All For You Blues Travelers | Blog About Fedtraveler

My family travels often enough that we accrue many frequent flyer miles. I also am in proud possession of a credit card that gets me frequent flyer miles on American Airlines: because of this, we almost always use American Airlines as our major air transportation provider, and LAX as our airport.

However, we recently put off planning a trip to New York City until just a couple of weeks before we were to be there, and our late scheduling meant that American Airlines would have charged the four of us $7,000 for the round trip, much more than we usually pay. So we did a little research; Jet Blue Airlines could get us to New York and back again, for a mere $2,000. Hmmm, seven grand, or two? Not something we needed to mull over.

That is how we found ourselves at the Long Beach Airport on an early Wednesday morning, tickets and coffee in hand. The first difference I noticed between LAX and the Long Beach Airport is the size; LAX is of course a major, international hub, and Long Beach is, well, Long Beach. Mostly outdoors in the hot Southern California sun, with no Starbucks or Hudson News in sight. Pre-flight smokers milled around my girls, who naturally made a big deal about gagging and dramatically asking if they were going to get lung poison. Their comments didn't go over too well with the smokers, who eyed me with apparent ill-will. Yay, I get to spend 6 hours on a plane with these people!