In March 2001, I was in my junior year of high school, and beginning to look at colleges to attend. I had family who lived in the Bay Area of California, and my uncle graciously offered to fly me out on some of his frequent flier miles to visit during my spring break and look at Stanford while I was out there.1
This trip was booked from Dayton (DAY) to Cincinnati (CVG) to San Francisco (SFO), and SFO–CVG–DAY on the way back—at the time, CVG was a Delta hub. The Comair-operated DAY–CVG segment is nearly useless (at only 63 miles or 101 km apart, it’s faster to just drive from Dayton to CVG than to take the layover), but it cost fewer miles to fly out of DAY with a CVG layover than to drive to CVG and take a direct flight.
My planned route in both directions (and my actual route out to California) is shown in blue. My actual route for the return flights to Dayton is shown in red.
Map generated by Paul Bogard using the Great Circle Mapper - copyright © Karl L. Swartz
I made the trip out as scheduled. However, while I was out in the Bay Area, Comair pilots went on strike, and my returning CVG–DAY segment was cancelled. My rescheduled return trip ended up being San Jose (SJC) to Atlanta (ATL) to DAY instead; I had to fly home from a different bay area airport, but Delta bumped me up to first class on one of the segments for the trouble.
The SJC to ATL flight also ended up getting delayed, so this now-15-minute ATL connection also became my very first Atlanta inter-terminal tunnel run. Fortunately, I did make my Dayton flight just before the boarding door closed.
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Though I did end up getting accepted to Stanford, I ultimately decided to stay in the Midwest and attend Rose-Hulman instead. ↩︎