Flying Home...

A few weeks ago, Orbitz called me to tell me that AirBerlin, who was our airline from Berlin to Frankfurt, was bankrupt. They rebooked us on a Luftanza flight, and all was well.

On Sunday, I got an email from them saying that I needed to call Condor, our flight from Frankfurt to Seattle, to confirm our ticket. I did and they assured me that flights were fine.

Spoiler alert: they were not.

Yesterday morning, the weather in Berlin was nasty. The wind was howling and it was kindof scary to lay in bed and listen to it from a very old, rickety building...

We got to the Berlin airport and went to check into our flight. However, apparently we did not have a ticket. The ticket number that we had was only for Frankfurt to Seattle, but not Berlin to Frankfurt. I called Orbitz and they gave me the original ticket number, telling me that it included both flights. Luftanza said no. Meanwhile, the entire plane has now boarded.

We ended up having to buy new tickets and the only seats they had available were in business class, which meant that they were not cheap. I will be having a long chat with Orbitz about this, since I already paid for those tickets once...

We caught the flight and flew to Frankfurt. We had time for lunch and we got on a plane for our 11 hour flight. Then we sat on the plane for two hours. Since it had been so windy, the airport was crazy backed up and there were 62 planes in line ahead of us. So we got to wait.

Leaving 2 hours late meant that we arrived 2 hours late. (It also meant that we were on the plane for over 13 hours...) This also meant that our plane home left while we were standing in the line at customs.

Since we were on two separate tickets, we were not automatically rebooked. I sat on the phone for a very long time, where I was told that the only flight home last night would fly all night and go through two additional cities, not arriving until 9:30am. The next option would get us home tomorrow morning.

We were so fried that we picked tomorrow morning, since another night of not sleeping all night sounded so miserable that we couldn't handle it. We got a hotel right next to the airport and fell into bed.

We were both awake at 6 this morning (since jet lag is lame). We decided to call the airlines again to see if there was anything we could do to get home today. She said that there was a flight leaving at 7:50am, made three stops and would get us home at 1. It was now 6:12.

We flew out of bed, threw our stuff together and started running to the airport. We got to the gate as they were mid-boarding, but we made it. 

This is our faces as we were standing in line to get on the plane. Don't we look terrible??? 

We're now sitting in the plane for the last leg of our flight and it looks like we might actually get home. I don't want to say too much, though, because I don't want to jinx anything. At the rate this trip has gone, anything can still happen...