The Joys of Travel

We made it to Seattle - barely. What a long day. We left our house at 6:30 am for our hour drive to the airport. We checked in to find out that our flight would be delayed by an hour. This would make our connection in Chicago VERY tight, but it was still doable. With a little luck, all would work out. We boarded the plane just when United said we would, but then we sat in the plane for another hour. Not good. Needless to say, we missed our connection in Chicago.

That's when the fun started. We were told to go to the Customer Service line to rebook our flight. No joke, there were at least 400 other sorry souls standing in this line with only 3 customer services reps working. After moving about 20 paces in line in one hour we did the math and determined that was not going to work out. We abandoned the line and managed to find an agent at the gate where the next flight to Seattle would leave. Unfortunately, that flight was already booked and 25% over sold. The next available flight with open seats was the next day, due to arrive Monday EVENING. Karlo's big Boeing presentation was scheduled for 9 AM Monday morning.

Neither of us wanted to make that call to the guy that arranged the presentation. Considering Karlo got stuck in Germany last year and never made it to Seattle for this very same presentation, this bad news seemed even worse. Making the call wasn't a problem because we couldn't find his phone number. So now, not only where we not making it for the presentation, but we we going to leave him hanging at the airport.

Enter our hero Lisa who saved the day by emailing a message to the guy we needed to contact. It took us another hour to come up with this solution, after calling every coworker in my address book and reaching nobody. Luckily all of this airport stress made our 3 hour wait period in Chicago fly by. Now the stress of whether or not we would make it on the next flight as stand-by passengers. If not, we needed to find a hotel. We waited and crossed our fingers. What were the chances we would get on? And what were the chances that we would not only get on, but score ourselves First Class seats? Well, we did and it was bliss. We had super comfy seats and gourmet food. I even liked the movie (Fools Gold). So the disaster of a day turned out just fine. Our contact was waiting for us when we landed. Thanks again Lisa! The weather is even nice for the first time in 6 months. We apparently brought the much missed sunshine with us.

More later . . .