flying home

07-Giugno-2006

Had our luck been better, we would be back in Houghton right now, but as it turns out, we are sitting in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport. Whoopty doo. To say the least, our flying hasn’t worked out quite as well as we had planned it.

We were concerned that it would be a close call in Paris since our flight out of Torino was delayed by 20 minutes, but we made it to the gate with a few minutes to stand in line and were ready for our on time departure. Unfortunately, Air France and the Charles De Gaulle airport do not believe in on time departures so after we boarded we sat on the plane for an hour and a half. What reason that we did this is still unbeknownst to us, but we think it had something to do with either a passenger getting off the plane or someone coming from another flight. Still not sure, that will be a mystery that will never be solved.

Thanks to Air France our 2.5-hour layover in Chicago went to about an hour, but if you throw in time to get our unchecked baggage, since this wasn’t a flight plan that we booked all the way through, and getting through customs, we were pretty much screwed from the start. Our luck could have changed if we hadn’t had to navigate a shuttle between terminals and an uncountable number of escalators with our gi-normous bags. We made it to check in 25 minutes before our plan was scheduled to leave and they had closed check in 5 minutes prior to our arrival. The woman behind the counter decides to make our trip even better and tell us just how it would be impossible to make anything work, we didn’t have a hotel voucher and we would probably need to pay to get our tickets re-booked. Finally, after a long-winded heated argument, she decided that we might by some sliver of a chance be able to catch our original flight out of Minneapolis to Hancock if we took a later flight out of Chicago to Minneapolis. Hanging on the hope that our flight to Hancock would be small that they would hold the plane and that they usually gain time when flying between the two cities, we were optimistic as we disembarked at 9:30pm and RAN to our terminal for the 9:40pm departure..

During our running we tried to make deals with higher powers for our successful departure, but no such powers granted us any wishes because the gate was completely empty when we arrived at 9:44pm. It was great. At this time we had been awake for about 23 hours. We pouted to the Northwest Airlines desk to see what we could do to reschedule and there met the nicest ladies we had the pleasure of dealing with thus far. They told us the AM flight was booked but the 2:55pm flight would work for us. Then we got a discounted hotel voucher and made our way to the pay phones to relay news back home.

Thus, we sat in our very nice hotel for the better part of the day and now we are killing two hours until we board. I am pretty disappointed with myself for deciding to book a flight to Houghton. Right now I don’t even have a house to live in, I know I have plenty of friends who are more than gracious to give me a couch, but it’s not like I’m going home. Home is still 9 hours away and thus unreachable by the time we get in tonight.

Hopefully we will have a safe journey, be able to find our baggage and maybe have somebody pick us up at the airport. Welcome back, I suppose.