Airport Agony

Well dear blogland, I promised that my next post would be from the States, and I did finally make it home! And let me tell you, what an adventure it was.

My story first starts from when I arrived at Zurich airport probably a little earlier than was necessary. That's OK though, as I like to have enough time to navigate through security and customs and also give myself some leeway when trying to navigate a new airport. But I made it through quite easily and had some time to wander throught the Duty Free shop to see if there were any last minute souvenir trinkets that I couldn't live without.

Then the trouble started.

Apparently it was too foggy in Amsterdam to land our aircraft, so we were stuck with an indefinite delay. But they did know when they were able to update us. I killed some more time catching up on work emails, they told us our connecting flights would most likely be held or delayed due to the weather, no big deal.

Well the flight ended up being delayed and hour and half at the airport, and then another 45 minutes in the air as we had to circle and wait for our turn to land.

Needless to say, my flight did not wait for me. I missed it by 55 minutes.

Then started the arduous rebooking process. Apparently KLM only has one re-ticketing counter in the entire Amsterdam airport. Due to all of the delays, the line was ridiculously long. All the while, the KLM attendants were telling us about this mysterious room of 20 workers who were working to rebook all of our flights. While waiting in line, we were to check our flight status at the kiosks to see if we were rebooked.

After about an hour and half, I could finally see the golden ticket counter, and still had no reservation information from the kiosk. But it seemed that when I finally reached the point that I could see the counter, the line stopped. The whole front of the line was a clusterf!@$ of people - people cutting, First & Business customers that were allowed to skip the line - just no organization whatsoever!

It was at this moment (and no, I don't know why it took me so long to think of this) I had the bright idea to just call the airline to be rebooked. So I pulled out my handy international cell phone and phoned Delta. Within six minutes I was rebooked through Minneapolis!

But I wasn't out of the woods yet, I wasn't able to print my new boarding pass from the Kiosks and had to proceed to the gate to receive my boarding pass. Now before getting to the counter, you need to go through customs, where they ask for your boarding card.

Needless to say, I was nervous.

Turns out, though, I was nervous for nothing and everything worked just as Sasha on the phone at Delta said it would. The attendant even made my day a bit brighter by prompting, 'What, you didn't want to wait at re-ticketing?' He made all of us who were in the same situation laugh and really lightend the mood.

And so I finally get on my miracle plane back to the States, and that plane got delayed for about an hour. Then there was terrible movies to choose from on the plane, and of course I wasn't able sleep.

I arrived in Minneapolis exhausted after having been awake for 24 hours, and just really needing to sleep. And of course, my flight was delayed again. Fortunately, as soon as I boarded the plane I passed out and slept for almost the entire flight back to Sacramento.

And now I'm home!! Huzzah!

So moral of the story kids? Avoid connecting throught Amsterdam, and if you do have the misfortune of travelling on a bad weather day, don't wait in their disaster of a line. Always call the airline, seriously their attendants are rubbish.