For some reason when building the schedules, the airline ends up creating these very long layovers -- always in Salt Lake, and always saves them for me. Since I had almost an entire day in SLC, I invited Nicole to follow me there from LA. In fact, she rode in the back while I was up front making silly pilot announcements. And when I say Nicole was in the back-- she was in the very back...because it was a Schmamerican Airlines flight. You see, if you are standby on Schmamerican, you will get the worst seat on the plane, even if there are many open seats elsewhere.
The only incentive is that tickets are only $1.58 per flight for Nicole. You get what you pay for I suppose. After showing Nicole the big Mormon church, we discussed our plans for the remainder of the day. We ventured someplace new -- the University of Utah campus! We took an Über there with a middle-aged woman who was very intrigued by the two Californians in her car who claimed to be a TV producer and an airline pilot. We walked through some botanical gardens after arriving at the Utah campus. Like most places like this, it was overpriced, and our timing was not ideal. Most plants and flowers in the gardens were dead. We spent about an hour walking around the gardens and then grabbed some lunch. After this, we took the tram back to downtown Salt Lake for the sum of $2.50, or to look at it another way, almost twice the cost of Nicole's ticket from SLC back to LAX this evening.
