Back In Cali

Well, Noelle and I made it back to California on Friday, no thanks to American Airlines. Our flight connected through San Diego, which apparently lacks the wherewithal to have a shuttle between the main terminal and the commuter terminals, so we had to go through security again. Bah. Then, when we got to San Jose, we waited in our jet for 25 minutes before they could find someone to haul the plane to the gate. After finally getting inside we go down to the baggage area to wait for our bags. And we wait. And wait. I ask them woman there if the the bags for our flight are coming on this carousel. She says yes. We wait some more. Suddenly a whole bunch of people show up who were clearly not on our flight. They wait. Some bags finally come down. We wait some more. More bags. I notice all the bags that are coming up are tagged for Hawaiian Airlines. After the third batch of HA bags, I go over to the woman at the AA counter and ask if there's been some problems with our bags. It's now been over an hour after we got off the plane and nearly ninety minutes since we were supposed to have arrived. She asks for my baggage tickets. I give them to her. She tells me they never made the connection from San Diego. WTF???

1. We were on the ground over an hour at SAN. Why didn't they get loaded?
2. If they never were loaded at SAN, why didn't she tell me that an hour earlier?

I have no good answers to these questions. We dragged our carry ons mile after mile to the taxi stand (There's a reason why I dislike flying into Terminal A, I remembered.) and get home around 1am. Bah. Fortunately the bags weren't lost and we finally got them at 1:30 the next afternoon. But AA is now on my list of airlines to avoid.