Dawdling Over Luggage Retrieval

I need to drive up to Oakland Airport today and redeem my luggage. I should have done this mid-morning -- I don't want to be stuck in commute traffic. But I am working from home today, and there are things that had to be done first. I also would like to watch the World Cup matches. So I'll need to wait until about 2 PM. I hope I can get back and forth to OAK fairly easily at that time of the day.

Expensive Exercise

While waiting until 2 PM meant I got to see the action at the end of the England-Sweden match, but it meant I also faced increasingly heavy traffic and slowdowns for the 20-mile trip up to Oakland airport. I parked in the hourly lot ($2 per thirty minutes), and found what must have been close to the last space in the lot, approximately as far from Terminal 1 (where Alaska Airlines is) as possible. Oh, well, I need the exercise.

I got more exercise than I planned on when I realized, just before getting to the terminal, that I'd left the luggage claim tag in the van, so I had to reverse course and repeat the trip to go get it.

There were no Alaska flights in at the time, so retrieving my bag from the luggage office was painless, and I made may way back to the van and left. That extra trip to the terminal, however, pushed me over thirty minutes total stay time, so it cost me an extra $2.

Traffic was heavy but moving on the way back, so I must have missed the worst of it. On the way home, I stopped at the Fremont post office to mail four packages for Emerald City. I wish they'd let us use the automated postal machine for Global Priority Mail. I got to queue for thirty minutes or so, when I could have certainly done the transaction myself in less than five, even though I had four GPM packages to mail.