„Not the start to the trip that we had planned ...“

August 8 was finally here. This long awaited vacation was going to start ……..

We got up around 7, and after taking showers and having breakfast we put out the leftover groceries for the house-sitter and left a note for her, before calling a taxi.

We closed up the house, hauled our luggage down to the street and waited. Didn’t take long and the taxi had arrived, the luggage been loaded and we hopped in and off we went to the airport.

The airport is only 20 minutes away and even with traffic through the city on a workday in the middle of the day it didn’t take much longer than the 20 minutes. We loaded our luggage onto a cart and off we went inside the airport. While we were just inside, Tom mentioned that he had gotten a text message. We stopped, he looked and then read out what had been sent to him.

Our flight from our hometown to Frankfurt had been cancelled.

Hm, what to do …. what’s next? Well, since we were at the airport, we got in line and went to the check-in counter. The agent was clearly not happy with everyone asking the same questions, so she just mentioned that we knew the flight was cancelled and there was nothing she could do. Yes, but what about our international flight. Her answer was to come back in half an hour, she might have an answer then. So we stepped aside and waited

…….. for half an hour.

Back to the agent and she was even more aggravated and told us to wait.

But while waiting I had noticed that there was a long line in front of the two airline-help phones. We decided to join that line. We waited for quite a long time until it was our turn and they finally were able to help. The lady on the phone was sorry, but there was no way we would be able to fly that day, but she had two seats on the same flight the next day.

Sure, not happy, but we’ll take those – umm …. but these seats are premium economy as that was what we had booked.

Yikes, no!

More time at the phone but about 10 minutes later we had the last two premium economy seats on the flight the next day. While on the phone we were told to head back to the agent to get us a ride back home since we didn’t need accommodations. Again we joined a long line, finally got to the agent and were told to step aside and wait for the next available group taxi. Fine.

By that time I was fuming.

But thankfully the group we were intended to join needed that whole group taxi, so we got our own taxi home. And while being driven back to where we had left just a few hours earlier I remembered that we needed to take care of a few things, like change the date on the rental car and try to change the date of the dining reservation we would have had the next day. So once at home we hauled all our luggage back,

called the house sitter that we didn’t need her that very day, then Tom decided to make us some pizza for lunch (as we had all the staples for it in the house),

while I tried to start figuring out our reservations for the first few days. In the end it took me all afternoon and several calls to the US to change the check in date on the hotel, to cancel and rebook the car, which turned out to be quite a bit more expensive for a day less since we had booked when they were offering a discount and I was finally able to change a few reservations around, so we could get everything in that we had wanted to do.

In the evening we had calmed down enough to enjoy a light dinner, watch some TV and finally go to bed a bit early after all that hassle.