One of the realities of living in Sandpoint is that if you want to fly anywhere far away (and you don’t have your own plane), you need to get up close and personal with the Spokane airport.
When you move here, you need to tell all any family or friends who might visit that they should not fly into Boise. For some reason, people who are unfamiliar with the state of Idaho (i.e. most people in the rest of the United States) assume that all of Idaho must be near Boise. (It’s not, and if you want to visit and you fly into Boise, I’m definitely not picking you up at the airport.)
To fly to Sandpoint, you need to go left of Idaho and look toward Washington. You will be landing at The Spokane International Airport, aka GEG, if you’re booking your own flight reservations online. Unfortunately, although it’s closer than Boise, getting to Spokane from Sandpoint is still somewhat of a trek.
We got to experience many, many hours at the Spokane airport on our recent trip to Arizona. Security restrictions and traffic being what they are, we left Sandpoint at about noon to catch our 4 pm flight to Tucson. All went well and we were sitting at gate B4 by 2:30 or so. After about 3:30 or so, it became quite apparent that there was a big problem because we had no plane. As it turned out, a lightning strike somewhere in St. George, Utah wiped out the Delta communications system. Planes couldn’t take off, so the plane that was supposed to pick us up hadn’t even left the ground in Salt Lake.
Not surprisingly, passengers in the Spokane airport were getting a little restless. For the most part, people seemed reasonably philosophical about the problems. Some people rebooked their flights and others decided to hold out to see if they could make it out that night. James and I were part of the latter group, since the thought of driving back home was not appealing.
As it turned out, we did make it out of Spokane at around 7:30 pm, although we missed our connection. After sitting for 5 hours in the airport we were ready to fly just about anywhere. But it worked out pretty well. Delta gave us a complimentary stay in a local motel and we rebooked our Tucson connection for the next day, so we finally made it there. The flight back here was far less eventful, but it felt good to see the last of the Spokane airport (at least until our next trip anyway).