Sweden vacation - June 12 (day 1) - Travel Troubles

I'm finally caught up!  Now (hopefully) I can blog about our vacation to Sweden :)

Soooo…our vacation was supposed to start on June 12, right? Well, I guess Mother Nature had something else in mind because we didn't leave until June 13.

So, how did we get here? Everything started out OK. We got all packed. My friend Liza dropped us off at the airport a few hours before our flight..so no worries, right? But we were flying United to Chicago from Indy, and the combination of those three things usually leads to a change in plans. There had been some pretty nasty storms earlier in the day in Chicago, which started all of the delays. One of 4 flights to Chicago was cancelled, and the others were delayed until after 10:00pm. Since our flight to Copenhagen was leaving Chicago at 10:05pm, we knew we weren’t going to make it. Sucks, but not the worst thing, right? I mean, we live close..we could just reschedule the same flight for the next day, right? Haaaahaaahaaa!!! Not so with United Airlines, my friends. Wow, I can honestly say that I have not seen the level of incompetency that was on display Saturday evening at the United ticket counters. First of all, we waited in line for 2 1/2 hours……and that was just to get up to an agent, and then spent another 45 minutes trying to figure out what the hell was happening.

I feel sorry for some people..there were a few couples that we’re flying somewhere in Europe for a cruise and they were in danger of missing the boat. There was another couple that spent 2 hours AT ONE TICKET AGENT…Joacim thought they must be trying to get tickets to the moon, but no, only to Iran via Frankfurt. I felt so sorry for them. Their ticket agent was a nice guy, but clearly didn’t have a good handle on what was going on…he easily spent over 2 hours on the phone with the help desk.

Our first ticket agent was THE WORST. We got up to the counter, she takes our passports and starts asking these random questions…I’m guessing because Joacim’s a permanent resident. Fine, no worries…completely normal. But then she says, “All right,you’re all checked in.” And Joacim and I are completely confused. I mean, we KNOW that the flight is delayed, and we know we don’t want to get stuck in
Chicago overnight and wait for the late flight the next day. All we wanted was to rebook for Sunday. And we looked at her and Joacim told her as much. And she said that she was sorry but she had to go downstairs. Yes. I cannot make that up. I looked at her and said, “OK, let me get this straight…you checked us in to a flight that’s clearly delayed, knowing that we’re going to miss our connection, and now you’re leaving?????” And she said, “Yes”. Shocked does not even BEGIN to describe how I was feeling…Utter disbelief? yeah, that's a bit closer.

Thankfully, Izzy was great.  I mean, with the wait, lack of dinner and the tornado warning (yes, tornado warning) in the airport, I expected a MAJOR meltdown, but nope.  She entertained herself by pushing baby Ellie in her stroller, and by watching Dora.  Thank you, Steve Jobs and Apple, for the iPad....LIFESAVER :)

Anyway, to condense the story (as I could go on and on about it), another ticket agent took over, spent lots of time trying to rebook us for Sunday, and even waited on the phone for confirmation that we actually had seats. So we went from having a flight from Indy to Chicago then Copenhagen to a flight that went from Indy to Philadelphia to Franfurt (with a 6 hour layover) to Copenhagen. It sucks, no doubt about it, but at least we've got tickets.