Trip Report: SAN-IAD-AMS
This is my flight, moving from California to the Netherlands for school. Flying United was a big enabler for the big move, since the carry on policy is quite generous and as Star Gold I could check in 3 pieces of luggage up to 70 lbs each for free.
The SAN Red Carpet Club had nice, big bagels (not the packaged Lender's-type mini bagels they had before). They also had the afternoon snacks in the fridge, so it was nice to have a toasted bagel and cheese for breakfast.
Breakfast to IAD was pretty good - omelette, black forest ham, sausage, and seasoned potatoes (of course my favorite part).
At IAD, I had heard from a thread on flyertalk.com that there was a new Lufthansa Lounge that accepted Star Gold card holders. Having already been to the different Red Carpet Clubs at IAD (with the usual selection of crudite, and packaged cheese and crackers), I was keen to try out the Lufthansa Lounge. Unfortunately to get there, you have to take the dreaded moon-buggies, I mean, mobile lounges, from the C/D concourses to B. And when we arrived, there were no direct mobile lounges (have to wait until 3:15pm for that luxury) so we had to take it to A, then walk the opposite direction back to B. That took about half an hour total since the moon-buggy schedule was so infrequent.
We were allowed into the Senator Lounge (I think nicer than the Business Lounge), and it was an instant blast of cold, air-conditioned teutonic chilliness of grey, silver, and white. There were quite nice food options including salmon, fajita chicken, salad, sandwiches, soup, and cheesecake.
Soon enough it was time to board the moon-buggy again back to the United gates. When the agent scanned my boarding pass, a hopeful "beep beep" came out of the machine. My boarding pass was rejected... because "they needed your seat so they put you in business class." Yay!
This was on one of the 767s with the new United business class flat bed which I wrote about earlier. But since I didn't have the seat-side storage like last time on the 747 upper deck, I did experience the inconvenience of having to get up and get things out of the overhead whenever I needed my toiletries, etc. Still, you can't beat horizontal flat beds, and the TV monitor is huge which made watching X-Men a pleasure.
There was a full dinner service, and I chose the Charlie Trotter-designed beef with braised cabbage and rosemary potato. The beef was tender, but very very fatty. The braised cabbage had a sour taste, reminding me of something I had on Lufthansa once, but the potatoes were quite nice with whole sprigs of rosemary perfuming the little cubes.
Breakfast was a continental affair of croissant and fruit. We landed early, and it was off to Eindhoven, with 5 check-in bags and 4 carryons between us!
