A long drive or a longer plane ride back from the Rose Bowl 

click to enlarge

I can barely believe it's been a week since returning to Salt Lake City from the Rose Bowl game between the University of Utah and Penn State. Like many or most, our group chose to drive there and back, and we somehow managed to miss the storms passing through central Utah during that journey.

Notably, we only saw one overturned car along the way, certainly some rookie driver who thought that speeding up in that nasty stretch between Scipio and Beaver was a good idea. On the bright side, the car in the upside down was heading north, so it was not driven by a Utah fan.

We'd left for Los Angeles at 5 a.m. on Friday, Dec. 30. Twelve and a half hours later, we were settled into our hotel in Woodland Hills—a nice place to make portage it turns out. Google did us a favor by routing us around LA through the edge of the Mojave Desert.

This is an area of California that doesn't exist in tourist brochures. It will be too soon before I return to visit Llano, Pearblossom or Littlerock, a trio of towns left best for backdrops to sinister movies.

Woodland Hills was nice, though. The Los Angeles Rams practice nearby, so it was that we ended up seated near former Georgia quarterback Matthew Stafford during the Georgia vs. Ohio State game on New Year's Eve. That seemed like a good omen for Utah. Another was that I'm quite certain Woodland Hills is where University of Utah legend Bryan Borreson is from.

Borreson kicked the winning 41-yard field goal for Utah on Nov. 22, 2003, to secure a 3-0 shutout victory. Not one to rest on those lofty laurels, Borreson and his partners now operate the hotspot Ivy and Varley in downtown Salt Lake City. He's a good Ute.

Alas, neither of those omens were enough to ward off the bad-luck demons that have affected our quarterback and defensive backs in the past two Rose Bowl games. If Cam Rising had not tweaked his previously injured knee, I believe we'd be celebrating now, not pouting. The only good that came of the ending was that the Penn State fans seemed to be genuinely nice. They also seemed to have mastered far more clever drinking games than are in the arsenal of Utah fans, who mostly default to shooting tequila.

The next day, we began our return to Utah at 4 a.m., missing the LA freeway mosh pit entirely and getting home in barely over 10 hours. Some of our party didn't drive and flew instead. It was the week of the great Southwest Airlines fiasco, so many of them were scrambling for flights 'till the very last minute to make the game. Others flew Delta. Which begets the question: Why did so many people book Southwest first instead of Delta? After all, Salt Lake City is a Delta hub, the pride and joy of all things Salt Lake City International Airport.

The answer is simple: Despite all the favorable benefits that our local governments bequeaths to Delta, citizens don't receive much favor. A Utah fan wanting to fly to the game could save hundreds of dollars by flying Southwest (or other airlines). So, fans bought those tickets up, even those routing through Las Vegas, Phoenix or even Denver, until the last flights available were basically all Delta flights.

And Delta charged like hell for those tickets. It's what monopolies and companies that say, "Play with me, or I take my planes away," do.

Or maybe Utahns are just stupid. For example, Atlanta and Minneapolis are also Delta hubs.

For grins, I selected the travel dates of Feb. 10 to Feb. 18 on Expedia.com to see what it would cost me to get to those two cities from Salt Lake, and also from Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Denver and Phoenix. In all instances, airlines such as Jet Blue, Spirit, American and United flew to those cities cheaper from Salt Lake City than Delta.

Salt Lake to Minneapolis was showing up at $419 nonstop on Delta. It was $146 from Denver (on Delta), $169 from Los Angeles (on Delta) and $209 from Phoenix (on Delta). Travel to Atlanta was priced similarly.

On a lark, I looked at the price of a ticket from Denver to Chicago on Delta. It was $134. From Salt Lake to Chicago, the flight was $290. But the funny thing is that the $134 Denver flight routed via Salt Lake City! How can it be half the price to travel 30% more distance? Explain that to me like I'm Wilber Wright.

I learned a long time ago never to ask another passenger what they paid for a ticket, lest hard feelings arise. No one pays the same once the algorithms and recognized browsers start doing their gouge-the-customer magic. I really don't get it. It would be like if you sit in a restaurant at 9 a.m. on Saturday, the biscuits and gravy are $5, but if you come an hour later, they are $7. And don't even bother to learn what the guy pays for his eggs on a Sunday.

Who else does business like that? Barbers charge the same all day, every day. I get supply and demand. I also get suppressed supply. I guess I'm still mad at Delta for helping to lose my luggage for eight days in the Paris Charles de Gaulle airport this past September. Mad enough that I figured I'd rather drive through two nasty blizzards, the spooky towns of the Great Mojave and the crazy Los Angeles traffic than fly Delta to the Rose Bowl game.

Which is what I'll do next year, too. Go Utes!

Send comments to john@cityweekly.net