Travel to the US

I went on a trip with my family to Florida in the United States for two weeks. It was a wonderful trip with ups and downs. The downs were related to our trip to the United States. Let us start from the beginning.

We were supposed to wake up at 3AM and then head to Billund Airport by car. From there we would go on the first leg of the flight to Amsterdam. For some reason I woke up at 1 AM and saw on my phone that the flight from Amsterdam to Miami got cancelled. I woke up my wife, told her about it and then I received another message a couple of minutes after, that we were heading to Munich from Amsterdam and from there to Miami. So we were back at it again. We got up, went to Billund, travelled to Amsterdam and waited there for 2 hours and 45 minutes. I was all the time worried about the 45 minutes transfer time in Munich. And guess what happened? We didn’t make the connecting flight to Miami. We ran through the airport, we had to switch terminals by bus etc. But we didn’t make it. We ran up to the gate but the gates was closed. I don’t understand why an airline would book us on a flight like that, if they knew that we wouldn’t make it.

This is the first time that I had never made a flight. I had never had a flight cancelled on me before. The other passengers (A polish family of 5, a Norwegian woman and an American women) were all together in the same boat, we missed our connecting flight. So I contacted KLM and got rebooked to another flight the day after. That part was now done and now we needed to figure out what to do with our luggage. Were we supposed to get it and then check the luggage in again, or will they keep it. We were going to a hotel, and getting our toiletries was important. However another ordeal was about to start about our luggage.

We got out of the airport and went to Lufthansa desk about our luggage. The person there sent us to the company (AHC handling, I believe) that handles that. I spoke with an employee who called someone and then he told me to go to Lufthansa Lost & Found which was located at the lower floors in the departure hall. I walked to that office and the lady told me that our luggage was at a special belt inside the baggage claim area in the airport on the other side of the security check. The lady at Lufthansa Lost & Found sent me up to check-in counter number 416, because I needed to get access to the other side. She called the lady at the counter ahead and told her about me, so it wouldn’t come as a surprise. I went up there and I saw that it was a check-in counter for people in wheelchairs and such. I gave her my passport and she filled out a form for me. The form was used as a “boarding pass” so I could get over to the other side of the security check. I went through, and in the process I got my Zippo ligther confiscated, and then I went to baggage claim. I was told to wait at carousel 6, however that one was closed for maintenance and I was told to go to number 8. Nothing came after 10 minutes of waiting and none of the existing bags were ours, so I went to Lufthansa Baggage help and they told me that they would keep the baggage until tomorrow. At that point I got a bit frustrated because they had told me to jump so many hoops in order to get them, just to tell me that they would keep the luggage. I didn’t show my frustration though. I thanked them for their help, got 4 emergency bags with toiletries and then I went out to my family who were waiting.

My family had been waiting for about 1 to 2 hours at the departure terminal. We got a hotel room a little bit away from the airport, crashed there and then had dinner in the hotel restaurant. We were exhausted at this point. I had been running around while the rest of my family were just sitting and waiting. I sort of felt bad because they were tired from getting up early, from the running and then now from the waiting.

The next day we went to the airport and got our boarding passes. The trip from Munich to Miami was almost 11 hours. It was incredibly long and the rest of my family were really exhausted from the journey. I believe it is because we had tried so much to reach the flight to Miami the day before, so we were really exhausted from that. Also 11 hours in economy class is really cumbersome. But we made it to Miami. Getting through the border checkpoint was pretty easy. The border agent checked the passports, asked us how much currency we had on hand and let us through.

Now we were in the United States and ready to start our vacation.