An Eventful trip – Part I – Missed Flight

We are finally back! The trip was both fun-filled and stressful at the same time. It all started at Atlanta airport. We were waiting at the gate to board our flight when my hubby decided to walk to the airline counter to get my daughter’s skymiles account straightened. Forty five minutes later he was still at the counter for something that should have taken five minutes. Since I had a bunch of handbags (thankfully!..you’ll see why) and a toddler with me I could not just get up and go to the counter to see what was going on. So I kept throwing ‘what the heck’ glances towards him and he would ignore some and shoot ‘be patient’ glances back at me. When he finally got back , before I could open my mouth to protest, he told me that our flight to Newark was going to be delayed and as a result we were going to miss the next connection which was to take us to Lisbon. He had spent the past 45 minutes trying to convince the air line to re-route us but since the connecting flight was with a different airline that did not have an office in Atlanta , we had no choice but to go to Newark and then take our chances from there. Which meant we could be stuck in Newark for more than a day…could have missed our cruise and all that. Now we could see the flight sitting at the gate long before it was scheduled to leave so it seemed odd that it wasn’t leaving on time. We were told that the reason it was delayed was due to the fact that the weather was bad in Newark so they had issues with landings and take offs. ‘Great!’ we thought , ‘this means the next flight could also be delayed’. Sure that would have happened if we were waiting at the gate before time for the next one. But this time, it took off on dot! We even saw it on the runway as we were alighting from the first flight!
What ensued in the next couple of hours consisted of two squabbling airlines tossing us from one counter to the other, one floor to the other until hubby finally lost it and yelled at a airline manager. That led to the manager finally taking us to the right counter and making sure that we got re-routed. They were re-routing us on a third airline via Paris instead of Lisbon since that was the only flight available so obviously we were worried about our luggage. It contained everything from diapers to all the nice clothes that I had bought specially for the trip that would be useless back home.
“Don’t worry about it, we’ll make sure that the luggage goes with you”.
“What about the return trip ? Would that reservation be affected?” .
”No. Not at all”.
We believed them, mainly because we wanted to. As we waited for the plane to push off, the pilot announced that we would be slightly delayed because they were waiting on a couple of last minute bags. We smiled with satisfaction!
On reaching Paris we had to go through yet another counter to counter and terminal to terminal run. Anyone who has traveled through CDG airport knows how big and crazy the airport is. We must have walked/run at least a couple of miles with Apple in my arms(during the entire trip she insisted on being picked up only by me) until we finally got our boarding passes for a flight to Venice. “What about our bags?” we asked the lady at the counter . “Don’t worry you’ll get them at Venice”.
On reaching Venice we stood in front of the conveyer belt hoping and praying that our bags have made it in. In spite of all the assurances we had received, there was a nagging feeling that we were not going to see our bags anytime soon.
To be continued....