A smooth on-time departure from the house was about the highlight of the journey so far. Completely packed and convinced we had remembered everything, we summoned the Uber car and had an uneventful ride in an F-150 King Cab (?!?) to the airport, arriving the requisite 2 hours before we were due to depart.
And then the fun began.
When we went to check our bags, the automated kiosk demanded to see the passport for Isiah Cannon. What? Who? I double checked all the documents and everything was in my name or Frank’s name. No misspellings or errors that we could see. The agent took our paperwork and informed us that Isiah was listed as the infant that I would be carrying on my lap. What? Who? I explained that there was no Isiah, at least not traveling with us and so the keyboard tapping began, foreshadowing the travails to come.
So we grabbed a drink and some lunch outside of security and headed to the non-existent line where Frank was promptly pulled out of line for secondary inspection. Apparently, they didn’t like the large bag of cheese and crackers I had packed in his carry on. Or maybe it was the ice pack – can’t let the Port Salud or goat cheese get warm now can we? Then to the bar outside our gate where we enjoyed a couple pints of Strongbow while we watched our flight get delayed later and later and later. It finally left about 1 hour and 45 minutes late which meant, of course, that we missed our connection in Newark.
As did dozens of other people. The customer service line was 50 deep and took an hour and a half to get through. I managed to get through on the phone before making it to the counter and got re-booked on the delayed 9:10 flight – which of course means that we will miss the connection in LHR so that took more re-booking (and more frantic keyboard tapping). We now have new pieces of paper saying we will land in London at 11am (when we should have been landing in Hamburg) and that we can take off for Hamburg 4 hours later. We should arrive just in time to get the last bus to Kiel where we will hopefully still have a hotel reservation.
So now I sit in Newark airport tapping at my own keyboard. Keep your fingers crossed – we might actually be boarding soon!
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