Sorry for the serious lack of interesting posts and updates, but
we've been traveling without decent internet for days. We have lots to
share, just need time to sit down and do it! And now, alas, we might
have some time but not necessarily in the way we want.... :)
I've determined that either Marshall or I must have some serious bad karma to work off. Maybe we're being punished for not blogging properly. :) Lots of stories, but this trip has had a series of small misadventures, and at the moment we are experiencing the kind of crap that makes a lot of people not want to travel....
Instead of arriving home today at 1:30 pm in Chicago, we are back in a hotel in Dubai. British Airways cancelled two back to back flights to London last night, so after arriving from Sri Lanka at 9:30 and spending two hours getting out of passport control and retrieving our bags (we changed airlines here), we find our 3 am flight cancelled. We then spent til 4:30 am in line with a hundred other exhausted bedraggled desperate travelers trying to get rebooked. I "sort of" have a flight out on Wednesday but as we were an American Airlines code share partner they could not actually print me new tickets, so now I have been bounced from American to BA and back, since no one seems to know how or be authorized to actually re-issue the tickets. And it was a struggle to even FIND one to rebook. It was scary. They were telling people the next flights into London, on ANY airline, were not until January 12th! So UK people were searching for flights to anywhere in Europe - Rome, Athens, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Amsterdam etc - and hoping they could take a Ryan Air or some other cut rate carrier home. To the US, there was absolutely nothing, they couldn't even get people home sending them East via Hong Kong or Singapore, which we obviously didn't want to do anyway as we just came from that way, and it would take 36 hours to get home. The main problem was that anyplace they looked, they could get you there, but not connected through beyond that to home. It was bedlam.
So long story short, we have a tentative flight Dubai to Zurich, Zurich to JFK, JFK to Ohare on Wednesday, but with a razor thin 1.5 hour connection in JFK, which we will likely miss and then be stuck in New York. Thank god Marsh doesn't teach til Monday, and hopefully I won't get my ass fired by this. Also happy we bought travel insurance to cover some expenses. Bright spot? BA put us up in an airport hotel. I was terrified, as I"ve seen "airport hotels" near Ohare - bedbug infested hell hole. This place? Holy batman, it's nicer than most of the hotels we've been in on our whole vacation. And FREE! I'll say this, if you have to get stuck somewhere, Dubai doesn't suck. :)
I've determined that either Marshall or I must have some serious bad karma to work off. Maybe we're being punished for not blogging properly. :) Lots of stories, but this trip has had a series of small misadventures, and at the moment we are experiencing the kind of crap that makes a lot of people not want to travel....
Instead of arriving home today at 1:30 pm in Chicago, we are back in a hotel in Dubai. British Airways cancelled two back to back flights to London last night, so after arriving from Sri Lanka at 9:30 and spending two hours getting out of passport control and retrieving our bags (we changed airlines here), we find our 3 am flight cancelled. We then spent til 4:30 am in line with a hundred other exhausted bedraggled desperate travelers trying to get rebooked. I "sort of" have a flight out on Wednesday but as we were an American Airlines code share partner they could not actually print me new tickets, so now I have been bounced from American to BA and back, since no one seems to know how or be authorized to actually re-issue the tickets. And it was a struggle to even FIND one to rebook. It was scary. They were telling people the next flights into London, on ANY airline, were not until January 12th! So UK people were searching for flights to anywhere in Europe - Rome, Athens, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Amsterdam etc - and hoping they could take a Ryan Air or some other cut rate carrier home. To the US, there was absolutely nothing, they couldn't even get people home sending them East via Hong Kong or Singapore, which we obviously didn't want to do anyway as we just came from that way, and it would take 36 hours to get home. The main problem was that anyplace they looked, they could get you there, but not connected through beyond that to home. It was bedlam.
So long story short, we have a tentative flight Dubai to Zurich, Zurich to JFK, JFK to Ohare on Wednesday, but with a razor thin 1.5 hour connection in JFK, which we will likely miss and then be stuck in New York. Thank god Marsh doesn't teach til Monday, and hopefully I won't get my ass fired by this. Also happy we bought travel insurance to cover some expenses. Bright spot? BA put us up in an airport hotel. I was terrified, as I"ve seen "airport hotels" near Ohare - bedbug infested hell hole. This place? Holy batman, it's nicer than most of the hotels we've been in on our whole vacation. And FREE! I'll say this, if you have to get stuck somewhere, Dubai doesn't suck. :)
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