Yes, it was a quick u-turn compared to my trip report on the flight up to Oakland. Open seating worked great for us then, but it was a different story on the return. In reality, I’m pretty happy to see assigned seating come to the airline.

The morning of our return started very early. We had a hot-air balloon ride scheduled, and that meant arriving at 6:45am. The weather was iffy with rain around, but they said we were good enough to go. Our balloon was the first of six to launch, and it was apparently a rare day when the winds took us north instead of south.

We had fantastic views and really enjoyed ourselves… until I got an alert saying our flight home was more than two hours late. It then slipped to a four hour delay. Crap. But here’s my ad for Southwest’s app. I was able to pull up the reservation and change it right there IN THE SKY for no charge. After weighing our options, we settled on a flight to LAX that was one hour earlier than the original flight. I checked in immediately after changing, but of course, we ended up with a brutal C7 and C8 boarding pass. That sucks, especially on a B737-700 where we would be some of the last onboard. I tried to pay for the A1-15 upgrade, but there weren’t any available.

This is when things got dicey for us. Our balloon pilot apparently got greedy trying to see if he could stretch our ride longer than the promised 40 to 60 minutes. At an hour and 30 minutes, we were up in the foothills looking for a place to land, and he wasn’t finding it. You don’t control the balloon; the wind takes you where it wants to go.

After one failed attempt in a small patch of an open clearing, there were some transformers approaching, and he decided he had to put it down in a very small patch of land. He skimmed the trees to slow us down, ripped several holes in the balloon, took a few large branches down, and plopped us down in a very small almost-clearing next to some grapes.

Safely on land, we were now getting somewhat concerned about the time. Would we even make it to Oakland in time for our flight home? The balloon company was doing everything possible to make sure that didn’t happen. Instead of getting us out of there, they had people come up in trucks to try to pack up the balloon first, paying no attention to the 19 passengers onboard. The balloon had been draped out over the vines, and they kept wrestling with this thing, ripping it at every turn.

In the meantime, they wouldn’t let us get out of the basket for awhile for some unknown reason. Eventually they did, but everyone was focused on trying to save the balloon and not on getting us out of there. They finally did get us into vans and we headed back, but it was now going to be a close call for our flight.

On the bright side, that morning saw an air traffic control mess in California thanks to both staffing triggers and low ceilings. It was not good for airlines, but maybe it would give us some buffer. Somehow, since our airplane was coming from Portland, it showed no delays. Of course.

We pulled up to the airport just about an hour before departure, and I relaxed a little. But then, I saw the very long TSA Precheck line and got nervous again.

There were CLEAR sharks telling people that if they had an Amex Platinum they could skip the line. They didn’t tell them anything else about sharing biometrics and all that, which I found fairly shady. In the end, it took us nearly 20 minutes to get through security.

Fortunately, by the time we got to the gate, they still hadn’t started boarding. I have no idea what was happening, but there seemed to be lengthy delays in getting some wheelchair passengers off the inbound flight. And then when they did get off, it took forever to preboard the group that may or may not have actually needed to get on first.

The airport was a cacophony of Southwest agents begging people to check their bags. That’s what you get when you start charging for checked bags; people try to bring everything on. My bag could fit under my seat if needed, and my wife decided to take a chance she could find a space onboard for her bag, but we knew chances weren’t great.

They finally called the C group, and the woman in front of me was completely bewildered. She just stood there at the pole, looked at her boarding pass, looked at the agent, and then looked back again. I couldn’t tell if she needed help or not. After all, she was in the right place. But finally she walked over to the agent, and I could hear the response. “No, it’s open seating, you don’t have a seat assignment, just take anything.” She walked back over confused, saying with mock outrage, “I’ve never heard of an airline doing that,” thinking everyone around her would nod in agreement. We did not.

Southwest 2741
October 26, 2025

On the airplane, I asked the cheerful flight attendant at the front if it was only middles at this point, and she said yeah. So, we decided to split up. While my wife decided to push back and look for an overhead bin with room — she found it in the next to last row — I just grabbed a middle up front and put my stuff under the seat, squeezing me into the middle.

I was going to take row 2, but that person in the window already had the shade almost entirely closed. I went to row 3, where I found a very sleepy woman with the window open.

The flight attendants were doing baggage ninja work, trying to find room for the last few people to put their things instead of making them get checked. Across the aisle from me was a guy with nothing under his seat and only a backpack in the overhead. The flight attendants asked if they could put that under his seat, and he said something about how he paid for a checked bag. I didn’t quite follow, but I can see that the flight attendants decided to just not confront him further. It was probably the right move.

It took forever to close the airplane up and get it ready to go. At one point, the pilots came on saying that we had been given a wheels-up time of 1:42pm which was about 20 minutes away. It took so long to get moving that we actually missed that time, only getting into the air at 1:45pm.

As we climbed into the cloudy skies, the woman in the window promptly slammed the window shut. WHAT? This was an outrage, but I couldn’t say anything. The laws of the sky say that window was hers. I looked across the aisle, but then that person shut it as well. The best I could do was see the sliver of window still peaking out from the seat in front.

Then, my seatmate decided she was uncomfortable in that position, so she switched.

COME ON! Not cool.

I spent the next 20+ minutes trying to get connected to wifi. It did not go well. The thing just kept spinning, but I suppose it did keep me busy for a bit. We reached cruise altitude, and about halfway through the flight, it magically started working… barely. At least I was able to get to the moving map and eventually watch a spotty NFL game. With no window, it’s all I had.

I had a cup of water and snagged Maui Monk pretzels as well. And then it was time to descend. LAX had poor visibility that morning, but did it still? I had no idea. The window was closed. But then, about halfway into the descent, the window woman opened her shade just about halfway so that I still couldn’t really see anything because her head was in the way. Little did she know, she made a powerful enemy on that flight.

When we finally got off the plane, I could see it was sunny, though with a lot of moisture in the air.

I got off the plane quickly but then I had to wait for ages until my wife got off at the back. We cruised by the newly-JetBlued gates which seem to have gotten a bit of a makeover.

Then we headed outside. It’s not Long Beach, but being able to walk to the LAX-it lot next door and hop in a Lyft on a Sunday with little traffic was about as good as LAX can be.