As I sit here on New Years Eve, prepping to move back to campus tomorrow, I can’t help but think of the past couple weeks. My sleep schedule is (sorta) back to normal, my cats finally don’t hate me, etc. etc. Things overall are returning to normal. No thanks to the awfulness that was the trip home from France. I didn’t even take any photos. That’s how bad it was. I always take photos on trips: at the airport, on the plane, of my lunch. You name it, it’s probably archived on my phone. I digress. Here is the horrendous tale from two weeks ago of my and Mara’s trip back to the states.
Everything that could have gone wrong, did. With the exception of the plane crashing, luckily.
I woke up at 4am that morning to catch the 6am bus so I could catch my 9am flight. Makes sense, right? Well, I woke up to a flight cancelation. The first flight. Originally, Mara and I were supposed to go from Marseille to Munich, Munich to San Francisco, and finally San Fran to Portland. Well.. now that we couldn’t get to Munich, that plan was out the window. My roommate, who was also on that flight, and I tried to figure out what to do but I ended up just going to the airport anyway to figure it out. She had been automatically rescheduled, whereas Mara and I had not been.
By the time I got to the Marseille airport, Mara was already on it with booking new tickets. Perfect. We get our new tickets after almost 2 hours of waiting, get in line, and check our bags. Insert typical airport protocol here. The only real difference between Europe TSA and USA TSA is that they don’t make you take off your boots, which was nice, because I got new Doc Martens while in Aix and didn’t want to pack them. They’re heavy. Cute, but heavy. We finally get through security and passport check, then board our flight late. Then leave late. Still, whatever, we were on our way to our new first destination: London Heathrow terminal 5.
Now, I knew that airport well after my trip to London a couple months back, so I was excited. I was gonna show Mara the Harry Potter store, we would get lunch, and board our flight. It was gonna be great. While those things did happen, I did get stopped at TSA for the stupidest reason. The guy said that we just needed to take out our laptops and ipads, and any other technology could stay in our bags. Well, I did what he said, and my bag got flagged. Thanks TSA agent. I stood for probably 20 minutes waiting for each person who forgot their acne cream in their bag to get checked just so I could tell the guy that it was my switch that got flagged. Awful.
We hit the HP store (I got a wand because I’m a stress shopper), got lunch, and took the in-terminal subway to get from the A gates to the C gates. The our flight got delayed. Then it got delayed again. And again. And again for the fourth time. Our flight got delayed for a total of almost 4 hours. The plane had a technical issue, then there was a security breach that halted all planes, then those two events took so long that they had to find new crew because some had timed out. Even after we boarded the plane, we sat on the tarmac for another 30 minutes before FINALLY taking off 4 hours after we were supposed to. At least the English Christmas dinner was nice.
Nine and a half hours later, we arrive in Seattle, our second location. The US, finally! If only we knew what we were in for. The weird thing about SEA-TAC is that for international arrivals, you have to grab your luggage and recheck it for connecting flights. Strange, but okay. So we waited for our luggage. And waited. And waited. We waited so long that we were no longer the only flight in baggage claim. Eventually, I got both my bags, but Mara only got one. Along with about half of that British Airways flight. Mara ended up missing her flight because of how long we waited, and I found out that I didn’t even have a flight. Let me explain.
So when we got our flights rescheduled, we were given little slips of paper to hand to the British Airways people so we could get our boarding passes. Mara got all three of hers, but I only got the first two. The lady said that I would need to pick it up in Seattle, since it would have been through Alaska, and not BA. I said okay, but I couldn’t help but be uneasy. I told my mom that I was confused about how the whole system would work, as I wouldn’t have a boarding pass to get through any security I’d need to or get onto the flight. She looked into it and turns out: I wasn’t even on the flight! The lady said I was but I wasn’t. I would have been stranded in Seattle had my mom not looked into it and driven up almost 4 hours in rush hour traffic to pick me up. It worked out though, because we ended up taking Mara home, but what the heck? As we were reaching hour 30 of being awake at that point, neither of us wanted to deal with flights.
I got back to my house at about 1am, my mom and her Fiancé having to work at 7 that morning. I felt bad for Mara though, since she had another hour and a half to go before she got back. We were exhausted. I think we ended up being awake for about 36 hours with very little sleep in between. I was very happy to be back in my own bed.
Travel doesn’t always go to plan. I have terrible travel luck, so I knew it had to come back to haunt me after multiple flights and trains that worked out with no issues throughout the trip. I just didn’t think it would come back with that much force. It woke up and chose violence and chaos. We can’t control airports, weather, etc. so I don’t want our experience that day to be a deterrent for everyone, but it’s good to show others the downsides of it all, especially for those about to go abroad for Jan/Spring term. Not everything is sparkling seas and rustic cups of coffee. To this day, I still don’t think Mara has her luggage.
Happy New Years,
Felicity