Our mid-morning drive to Charlotte goes off without a hitch, barely any hint of rain until we are actually pulling into the airport. Perfect. We’re checked in and off the lounge in no time. The flight to JFK is 30 minutes late, but we don’t care, we’ve got plenty of time in JFK, so being a little late isn’t an issue.
Once boarded, the flight goes off without a hitch, a little bumpy, so no service, but we’ve just spent hours in the lounge – we don’t really need anything but the little bottle of water they gave us when we boarded.
Safe and sound in JFK, we make our way to the new Chase Sapphire lounge, which is nice, except….well…they don’t have any beer. What? Their taps are down and they have no bottles or cans. Well that stinks. They also have a menu to order freshly prepared items, which we had already ordered before we realized there was no beer. Um, this is not going as well as you would expect from a Sapphire lounge – a new concept that in this instance isn’t working so well. The food took forever – it was only meatballs and ramen – and they didn’t even have the ramen, but didn’t tell us until after they delivered the meatballs. Sigh.
Ok – well, we have another lounge option which we head to immediately after we finish our meatballs. The atmosphere in the Priority lounge is nothing like Sapphire, more of a cafeteria vibe, but we have a seat, food, and yes, beer and wine. So you know what? That’s all that matters. Because this is our dinner – we have decided we aren’t going to wait until after midnight to eat dinner on the plane – we’d prefer to try to sleep.
In the end, everything works out. We are fed, we are getting sleepy, and we can finally go to the gate and line up to board. Safely ensconced in our bulkhead seats, we ready to go. As it turns out, there is turbulence on our ascent, so dinner service can’t even start until 2 hours after takeoff. Good decision to eat in the lounge! Immediately after takeoff, we stretch out and hit the hay for as long as possible during the 8 hour flight.
Andiamo 