Finding the New UA Club in SFO

On my way to ANC for a week of vacation.  I was flying DCA-IAH-SFO-ANC in order to get about a 1,000 extra EQM.  As a UUA Gold, upgrade chances were iffy, but it happened on the first leg and then they pulled me from coach to take First Class from a couple who didn’t make the flight due to thunderstorms that day.  So two legs out of three was pretty good!

When I first received my boarding passes in DCA, an extra slip printed out warning me that at SFO I would be arriving in Terminal 3, but departing from the International Terminal.  Actually, what this meant was that I was arriving at one of the old United gates, but departing from the new wing that was built for Gates 60-69.  Being San Francisco, it just had to have a psychedelic art peice of spinning wheel patterns…

Although they had the old UA Club in the old Terminal 3 location, I didn’t stop there as I wanted to find this new gate first.  It turned out to be quite a hike.  The new wing was very nice (like a real airport from this century), but I found no club and had a hard time believing that I would need to hike all the way back to the old one.

Sure enough, I found it, but it was really well hidden.  It is on the main corridor between the old wing and the new walking in the direction of the International Terminal.  It reminded me of the difficulty in finding the USO club at SFO if you have ever been there.  Following the small signs, I eventually found the club and it was fairly nice.

The usual bar and food area.  Thankfully, UA has moved to serving real food there and I enjoyed the Chicken Gumbo and hummus with real bread rolls.

The club was decorated with a bunch of great photos of United’s heyday in San Francisco.  I took this one which proves that the 747 was not the first double decker passenger plane.  I’ll bet it was a noisy and dirty as a C-130, but it still would have been neat to fly.

I left to board my flight to ANC, but stopped to pick up a little something that is a family tradition with us – real sourdough bread!

More on Anchorage, the rest of this week.