Of all of the things that Elizabeth and I could have disagreed about when it came to our European vacation, I doubt many people would have pegged “the flights” as our biggest conflict. And yet that’s exactly what it ended up being – a debate not over where to fly, but how to fly to Europe. We’d settled on a pretty solid logistical plan to open up the trip – Elizabeth and I would fly to Washington on the evening of October 3 after work so that we could fly with Pam to Italy in one go – but that still left the question of which tickets to book.
We’d been saving all of my Chase points for a year to try to fly business class to our destination (Naples, as Elizabeth, Pam and I worked it out). It turns out that that was a ridiculous, doomed-to-failure venture. One does not simply use points to fly business class. At least not if you only have 120,000. Because a business-class fare to Naples from DC, as we found out this summer, is going to run a whole lot more than booking an economy flight. Economy flights one-way really aren’t that bad! It seems like we were finding options for maybe $500. But business class adds literally thousands to the cost.
And therein lay our disagreement. Pam offered to pay for much of our travel, including flights, for which I want to be clear that I am so, so grateful. It let us do so much more than Elizabeth and I could ever afford to on our own. But to me, the idea of paying a multiple of the economy cost just to fly in better comfort for an eight-hour flight just didn’t add up. At my core, I am a thrifty Midwesterner who sees everything as a value proposition. At her core, Elizabeth saw this as an opportunity to make memories with her mom that they hadn’t had time for in her childhood, and who could blame her mom for wanting to make those memories as fun as possible? The two of us went back and forth on it for days and weeks. Eventually, I surrendered, because there really is no winning in a disagreement with your wife.
I am writing this in part to say that I’m glad that I surrendered. Flying business class was a grade-A experience.
Elizabeth and I had our first flights of the Europe trip even before Pam (Winston took the LSAT on October 4 and chose to skip out on the first leg of the vacation to recover). On the evening of October 3 after work, we flew from Oklahoma City to DC. Due to your typical evening weather things around the country, both Southwest flights were delayed, but not impossibly so. I was actually quite happy with the flight experience because the two of us had time to sit down in OKC to eat dinner (the green chile burger at Hatch was pretty good. I had no idea how much I was going to be missing burgers in 2 weeks), and because both legs from OKC to St. Louis and St. Louis to DC were deadhead flights, so Elizabeth and I got rows to ourselves. It was still cramped, but it was cramped in a familiar and lovable way. There was even a fun sprint through the STL airport to make sure we got onto the connecting flight in time (the crew was holding up the flight for us and a few other passengers – perks of flying on an 80% empty plane).
That gave us a full morning at Pam’s house in DC to enjoy before heading to Dulles Airport to begin the international travel. We made the most of it – bagel sandwiches from a shop 10 minutes from Pam’s house that Elizabeth used to frequent, and then I watched the first half of the Michigan/Wisconsin game while Elizabeth helped Pam do some very last-second packing. Nobody panicked too much, so I guess it was never a question of not having Pam’s suitcases zipped up on time.
Given the immense amount of baggage between the three of us (a checked bag each plus the normal complement of carry-ons), there was just no chance that everything would fit in a normal-sized Uber. The ride-share that did show up on Pam’s driveway was rocking a giant black SUV. Getting inside of it made me feel a little bit like I had my own Secret Service protection, an impression aided by the typical 495 traffic over to Dulles. The driver pulled into that weird 80s-style terminal that IAD still has, lugged all of our bags onto the sidewalk, and went on his way to go drive some other would-be presidents to the airport.
For the first time but not the last time (far, far from the last time) on this trip, I found myself glad that Elizabeth was more knowledgeable and comfortable with international travel than me. Would I have gotten over to the Lufthansa check-in area without her? Yes. Would I have been ready with the knowledge of which bags were being checked by whom, and with passports already open to the right page? Absolutely not. She really shines when it comes to the details like that, and Pam and I were just following in the trail of her glory.
Another detail that Elizabeth has a razor-sharp eye for: which lounges she’s able to visit at any airport at any time. We had arrived at Dulles with several hours to spare before our flight (international travel!) and security took almost no time. This was one of our last trips where she could still bring guests into the Capital One lounge for free, and it was just past the international pre-check line. Like most other Capital One lounges, this one catered to the young and the up-coming of the middle classes. I actually liked it a lot more than the lounges in Denver or DFW. The food spread was phenomenal and so were the drink selections. The Wi-Fi was good enough to let me catch the end of the Michigan game and to give my grandma a last call before leaving the country for two weeks. The best part? Unlike so many other middle-class credit card lounges, the whole space was empty. I was extremely happy to kill an hour or two there. Pam was even more over-the-moon about the experience than I was.
We should have stuck with the good thing and not pushed our luck, but if there’s a downside to Elizabeth knowing everything about everything travel-related, it’s that she refuses to leave a stone unturned. In this case the stone was the Turkish Airlines lounge, which Lufthansa was using while they renovated their own space. That should have been the first sign for the three of us to stay away, but instead we wandered into the loud, overcrowded belly of the beast. There were lots of TVs in the lounge, which sounds promising on a college football Saturday. Unfortunately, every single one was tuned to an international news station. To give credit where credit is due, Elizabeth informed me that the fine folks at Turkish Air made a really good mac and cheese. So there is that.
Our gate was right by the Turkish Air lounge, which made it easy to leave a little ahead of time and try to prevent a repeat of The IcelandAir Honeymoon Incident (don’t ask). The plane pulled up after a while of sitting there. I knew international flights were huge, but damn this thing was big.
If you look near the jetbridge, you can actually see that there are two rows of windows with one above the other. Yes, that is what it implies – our flight was a double-decker show. For someone who gets horrific flight anxiety, Elizabeth sure spent the final few weeks before leaving for Europe in quite the excited tizzy over our seats being on the upstairs side. I guess when you’re in business class, you literally get to soar above it all.
Boarding was kind of an insane (and impressive – we’ll call it insanely impressive) feat. A Boeing 747-800 class international flight can comfortably fit 467 passengers, and it felt like Lufthansa just had all 467 of them stand up at once to commence boarding. After a few minutes of queueing, I realized that the business class line was going to take us an entirely different way onto the plane than the economy line. A gate agent checked our passports, scanned our boarding passes, and I got a little surge of excitement that I hadn’t felt since January 2019 when Elizabeth and I boarded the Carnival Dream for the first time. I lost track of where the economy portion of the jetbridge was leading, because our business class queue was leading up and into the plane. Lo and behold, there was the staircase. I grabbed Pam’s carry-on to lug up and onto the flight and we climbed up the little narrow staircase.
And just like that, we had entered a whole new world. It was shimmering, shining, splendid. There were our seats. It’s a testament to the space each person gets that nobody was bumping into each other on the way to their seats in the business class section even though there was only one central aisleway. Here’s a YouTube screenshot of the configuration.
As befits a window seat princess, I sat on the farthest seat to the right in our row (from our perspective; it’d be on the left in the picture above). Elizabeth was next to me. Across the aisle, Pam got to share a row with a random stranger. Elizabeth was a little concerned about this setup since the seats in the row do sort of angle into each other, making it a bit awkward to sit next to someone you don’t know. But Pam didn’t complain and seemed to get along just fine with the gentleman.
The number of little gadgets and whimwhams that could make your flight experience better was enough to immediately tickle my fancy. It took almost no time for me to realize that the seats had multiple reclining levels – one button to get into a very comfortable lazyboy type of setup, and another to go all the way horizontal. Given that this flight to Frankfurt was a red-eye, that boded well for my night (we had pillows and blankets right there for us). There was a little compartment between my seat and the window that flipped open and was big enough to stick my duffel bag in, so I didn’t even have to store it up above us. Each seat had its own seatback screen with a remote and complimentary headphones. About the only thing missing were massagers or heated seats.
Elizabeth and I had barely settled down and started exploring features of the seats before a flight attendant arrived and asked if we wanted some nuts and champagne. Why yes, don’t mind if I do! Over the course of the next 8 hours, the flight attendant would repeatedly visit and ask if we needed refills on our beverage of choice. Elizabeth reacted enthusiastically enough (o say nothing of frequently enough) that as we were preparing to land, the attendant came by with an unopened bottle of the champagne and gave it to Elizabeth as a lil treat. The spirit of open-handed generosity would permeate my Lufthansa experience.
It did take quite a while from the start to the finish of boarding. The sun had set in a blaze of glory behind the hills of suburban northern Virginia by the time our plane finally began its ungainly taxi away from the gate. The timing was perfect – UCLA had just beaten Penn State in a stunning (and hilarious) upset that I’d watched on my phone. Now, with the plane lumbering down the runway (seriously – a 747-800 does NOT accelerate as fast as you’re used to), I put my phone in airplane mode. It would remain in airplane mode from the evening of October 4 until the afternoon of October 18.
While I tested out the various amenities of our aircraft, Elizabeth quickly got down to the important business of watching movies on her seatback screen. When you reclined your chair and put the blanket on, it really became quite cozy to do so.
On the other hand, I may have been a little too quick to try and use the cozy features. Dinner service started before too long as the plane soared somewhere over the western Atlantic. We all know the joke about airline food, so I had some macabre interest in what the meal would end up being like. And to be honest, it really wasn’t bad at all. Would I describe my steak as “great”? No. But it wasn’t terrible, and there was a decent selection of appetizers versus main courses, and of course a German airline had decent beer options.
With the dinner of course came bread and olive oil (get ready to read about that a lot over the course of this series), and some cheese, and dessert. It was a whole production that actually took up quite a bit of the 7:50 flight time. Now I was starting to stare the reality of a red-eye flight in the face: it was still only like 8:30 eastern time, but that meant it was 2:30 am in mainland Europe. Particularly with our flight scheduled to land in Frankfurt at 8:00 am, that meant there were only 5 hours left in a European night to try to get sleep. Jet lag starts to make more sense when you start doing that math. I watched a few more Parks and Rec episodes to try and get myself a little bit more tired, but eventually concluded that sleep was just going to have to be a brute force phenomenon. Elizabeth and I both put our seats all the way into recline mode and tried to let the steady thrum of the engine lull us to sleep.
It wasn’t easy for me, given how early it felt. Also, the plane was quite warm. Lufthansa had provided us with those blankets and I used mine to try to make it feel more like sleepy-time, but that just made things even hotter. The seat itself wasn’t the most uncomfortable sleeping experience of my life though, especially with the little pillows at each seat. All in all, I got a couple of hours of sleep and bet the others did too. This wasn’t enough of a sleep interruption to faze a 24-hour shift worker like me.
Daybreak came much earlier than it would have if we weren’t moving east at 300 mph all night. Figuring that was it for sleep for me for the night, I sat up and stretched – and realized that breakfast service was already underway on the plane. On the other side of the aisle, Pam was already awake with a breakfast platter in front of her. Next to me, Elizabeth was still resolutely sawing logs. She eventually begrudgingly came around to the real world.
Before too long, the plane began its final descent toward the European mainland. We broke through a deck of fairly low clouds, giving me the first view of what awaited below us. It looked… just like Michigan in the fall, to be honest. Not sure why I expected something different.
Landing and connecting at Frankfurt Airport was a rather laborious process, even notwithstanding the part where an entire 747 had to be deplaned. When you’re in business class, you get off the plane pretty quickly (though your wife might take a picture of you walking down the in-plane staircase with two people’s worth of baggage):
Unfortunately, it was one of those flights where a bus has to take you back to the terminal. And we had to walk to the bus. And it was raining (a steady, moderate rain from a storm system that was actually diving southward through Italy as well). That was suboptimal, as was the layout of the inside of the airport. The three of us walked for probably 15 or so minutes before hitting a customs checkpoint, then another 5 minutes to get to our gate. At least some of the signs were in English, though most of them were in German.
For an international flight, we really didn’t have that long to connect in Frankfurt. There was enough time to find a bathroom (right next to the sign for the “babyraum”, or the baby changing room”), throw on a new pair of clothes since it was a new day, and brush my teeth. I even had just enough time and Germanic wifi to watch the highlights of the Tigers game from the night before (they had won Game 1 of the ALDS 3-2 over Seattle in extra innings) while Elizabeth found a bakery and got us pretzels.
And then we were boarding the regional Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt down to Napoli. This one had much less fanfare for business class, which was essentially just a domestic United flight’s first class. The rows were even three seats wide in the business class section, though Lufthansa only filled the aisle and window seats. I honestly don’t have much to say about this second connecting flight for a couple of reasons. The plane wasn’t as exciting, the flight was much shorter and didn’t have a meal option, and most importantly, I slept through the whole thing. Elizabeth and Pam also dozed off at various points (they fell asleep before I did after takeoff), but the two of them must have woken up at some point during the approach to Naples. The approach was longer than it might have otherwise been as well because of the heavy rain, which apparently was wreaking havoc on Naples below us. When I awoke with a start, Elizabeth told me we were in a final circle before rerouting elsewhere. Before I had time to chew on what that meant, the flight broke through the low clouds into a damp mountainside metropolis. After all the time and planning, we had arrived in Italy.
Like I said at the start of the post, the style in which we flew to Europe had an outsized share of our attention prior to travel. Usually it’s the destination that makes a flight memorable, not necessarily the journey. In the case of our Europe trip, the destination(s) still shone through as the main attraction, but flying business class was an exciting subplot of the adventure as a whole. I will once again admit to being wrong – business class was a unique and memorable experience. I doubt Elizabeth and I will ever have the money ourselves to be able to fly business if/when we travel on our own to Europe. Only time will tell if this initial foray ruined my ability to deal with flying with the masses.
