Well that was exciting

Left for the airport about 9:15 am, and started looking up flights while on BART.  Sint Maarten seemed like an early contender, it was less than $900, and I'd long wanted to go there due to a remarkably-placed airport.

I arrived at SFO around 9:45 and parked myself in some chairs in the international check-in area.  The public wi-fi was not fully functional (I couldn't get their homepage to load after about 5 minutes) so I started tethering and began my search.  Sint Maarten was not a real option at that point, either that fare was gone by that time or what I saw earlier was way stale.

The leading options at that point were Montreal or San Juan, Puerto Rico.  Both seemed like great places, though perhaps not much of a challenge, so I wasn't feeling overly enthusiastic.  Both were night flights, redeyes to the east coast and then morning connections, so I had all day to decide too, and kept looking at other options.  South America was tempting, but the connections were terrible (overnight layover in Houston and/or 2+ connections) and expensive.  Mexico City looked like a great and practical option, but there were concerns over safety (a lot of recent kidnappings, though perhaps not of foreigners).

After nearly an hour of checking and rechecking, I was resigning myself to Montreal, and starting to look up interesting potential places to stay.  Then I saw it on the Google flight search map.  Singapore, for $1500, and a completely sane connection in Hong Kong, departing shortly.  I did a quick sanity check of the visa requirements, and then rushed to book it.

At this point, it was 10:45am, and the flight departed at 1:30pm.  I went to book at the United web site, but it immediately gave me errors, claiming my local currency was Japanese Yen and I could not do a same-day booking with Yen.  (This was likely due to me last having accessed the United website from Japan last month, and United's website probably being buggy, to my misfortune.)  I quickly called their reservation line from my phone to see if they could book it directly, but by the time I got an agent, she claimed the HK flight was full.  While on the phone with her, I somehow got further into the reservation process, so I told her it was all good and hung up.  I entered my billing info, crossed my fingers, and ... unspecified error page.

I got up and sprinted to the check-in counter to get to an agent.  Within 2 minutes I was talking to a very helpful agent who was weirdly unfazed by me trying to book a last-minute ticket to Singapore.  And yet, her computer was showing the HK flight as full too.  She looked at this evening's Tokyo flight: also full.

Dismayed, I returned to a seat and started looking for similar options, but there was nothing.  And after 10 more minutes, I was resigning myself to consider Montreal and San Juan again, and then, there it was again.  The same flight.  Apparently seat availability fluctuates in real time as people with misconnections are rebooked or dropped from flights.

I rushed to book the fare again, skipping past seat assignments, and clicking confirm.  I anxiously awaited at the Verified by Visa page on my sluggish cell-phone-tethered internet connection, and then ... CONNECTION TIME OUT!  I didn't even know if I was charged or not or even had a ticket.  I tried to load the United web site and it just hung there, for 2 agonizing minutes until, the home page showed I did indeed have a reservation for Singapore.

So, I rushed to check in, ran to the lounge, booked a hotel online for the first 2 nights after 2 minutes of research, and here I am, 5 minutes to boarding, and having to run to my gate...