Airport Early

Started: 2025-12-28 23:30:25

Submitted: 2025-12-28 21:59:05

Visibility: World-readable

Catching an early flight home from Seattle after Thanksgiving

After spending Thanksgiving with the Stone family in Mount Vernon, Washington, we flew home from Seattle early in the morning on Sunday after Thanksgiving. This seemed like a better idea than paying more for flights at a more reasonable hour.

We spent Saturday night at the Hilton Seattle Airport, located across the street from the airport. We could have taken a hotel shuttle to the airport, but that seemed like more work than necessary because we could walk to the pedestrian bridge leading to the Link station and keep walking past the parking garage to reach the very end of the airport terminal. We left the hotel at 05:30 PST, which was entirely too early. (Calvin was distressed to learn that there's a 5:30 in the morning too.)

My spicy take for this trip is that Seattle airport is the Winchester Mystery House of airports: it always has been under construction, and always will be. This year the construction is disrupting the security checkpoints; the direct route to our gate at the north satellite was blocked. (In a separate cybersecurity incident the airport can no longer report checkpoint wait times on its website, making it harder to find the best entry point when all of the checkpoints lead to the same gates but some are more convenient than others.)

There were entirely too many people at the airport considering how early in the morning it was. Our flight to San Jose was full. It was cold enough that we stopped at the de-icing pad before taking off. I sat in the window seat on row 25, just ahead of the door plug on this 737 MAX 9, which gave me a good view of the wing getting sprayed with avation-grade antifreeze.

Deicing at SEA

On our descent into San Jose a thick layer of fog covered the Santa Clara Valley. We descended through the clouds on the standard approach to the north, and I couldn't see the ground outside my window until we we were just about to cross 880 on final approach, just outside the airport perimiter.

737 wing on approach to SJC over the Santa Cruz Mountains

The main advantage of getting up early was that we got home by 10:30 on Sunday morning. (Some weekends I might not get up until 10:30.) This gave us plenty of time to unpack and do laundry as if it were an almost-normal Sunday instead of the last travel day of the Thanksgiving holiday.