The Travel Saga

So, our trip to Sydney did not go quite according to the original itinerary. Flying in late December is not good in the northern hemisphere, not only is everyone else doing it too, but there's also a lot of snow around. They really should move Xmas to July here!

Well we started out ok, we got to the airport nice and early. We were so proud of ourselves for checking in our bags on time when all the people queueing with us were running late. Our flight was a bit slow taking off but we landed at Chicago with enough time to make our connection. Or so we thought - the real delay was getting off that plane and onto the next. It had been snowing at Chicago (the tarmac was covered and planes were guided by lights) and the plane at the gate needed to be de-iced before it would get out of our way. By the time we got into the terminal and found the right gate we'd missed out flight by about five minutes!

Just getting an answer was hell, there was no-one staffing the info desk so we had to go out of security and get a new flight from the ticketing counter. We were hoping to get the next flight to LA to make our connection but the woman there informed us in no uncertain terms, "You won't be flying out of Chicago tonight." She put us on a plane for the next afternoon (via San Francisco AND Auckland!) but refused to pay for a hotel for the night. They blamed air traffic control.

They offered us a voucher but we found another motel cheaply enough and waited for their airport shuttle to pick us up. It was freezing cold and snowing heavily but we had to keep going outside to check if it had arrived. When we got to the motel we saw that the only food was a Maccas. It was only next door but we had to walk over snowdrifts to get there and we were only wearing summer clothes!

The next day we went back to O'Hare airport well before our departure time only to find that they were already predicting delays for our flight to San Francisco. We saw that we would miss our connection so we went to the help desk to ask whether we should even bother getting on that plane and to hopefully get a third itinerary. That's when I realised just how many people are travelling that time of year. The queue stretched about 100m and it took over an hour to get to the front. Behind us were a middle aged Kiwi couple who heard that we were going to Auckland and told us they would be missing the same flight. But that wait actually paid off, after much checking and fiddling, the woman at the desk managed to get us on a flight leaving San Fran later that night and going straight to Sydney. (Cindy was disappointed that she wouldn't get to see Hobbits but I was glad that it would be a shorter flight.) I wondered why we hadn't been put on that flight the night before and then I realised that we were only confirmed for that flight, not checked in yet. I wondered what that meant and we got a bit worried.

When we arrived at San Fran, we had to check in with all the others who had just rocked up at the airport. The queue wasn't long but it moved very slowly with just one person serving. When we were being checked in I enquired about my suitcase, as I had realised that the first woman at Chicago had stolen my claim check, which was stuck to an itinerary I handed her. When she looked it up in San Fran, she saw that our bags had actually made the connection from Chicago to LA on the first day. She explained that they couldn't fly with us and would only come after I had filled in the form explaining that they were missing. I said, "Well give me the form now and they can start moving them while we're on our way there." She replied that that was impossible, I had to request them from the final destination. So for 14 hours while we were in the air, our bags were at LAX with no one doing anything about it.

The stress didn't end there, even. For some reason we couldn't get a seat allocation at check-in so we had to go through with just boarding passes and get seats at the gate. Right up to the last minute we thought something else was going to happen to keep us off that flight but luckily they had seats for us. I can only assume that someone else must not have made the connection and we benefited from their misfortune!

And that's about it. We requested our bags upon arrival in Sydney and they only took a day and a half to deliver them to Penrith. In the mean time we had to go shopping for summer clothes and underwear but you can never have too many of those!