Our (long) trip back

I said to Sue somewhere during the day, "I must block this part of the overseas experience within a day or so ... or else I'd never come back."  I hate the long flight.  And given that Graz is not a European hub and Fayetteville (or in this case, Minneapolis-St. Paul) is not a major US hub, you are guaranteed of at least three flights in one day.  A long day, for sure.

This particular flight was at least made more enjoyable because of the company.  We coordinated our return with Loulou's summer trip to the US.  So, Loulou and her son joined our family.  The kids had grand plans for rotating the seating (we had three sets of two seats right by each other), but it ended up being Grace and Loulou's son across the aisle from Henry and Sue with Loulou and I in the row behind Sue and Henry.  The kids watched lots of movies, snacked heavily and generally enjoyed the flight.  Loulou said that she's never had such a restful trip over.  All's good, right?  Well ...

Back in Graz, when we checked in at the airport, we received our boarding passes for the two Lufthansa flights (Graz -> Munich and Munich -> Newark).  We assumed they couldn't print out boarding passes for the United flight from Newark -> MSP.  Before we landed in Newark they made an announcement they would be handing out connecting boarding passes at the baggage carousel.  So, while we were waiting for our bags to come out with the other connecting flight bags, Sue checked in to get our boarding passes, but was told they didn't have them.  We thought that was odd and slightly concerning.  Still waiting for our bags, we checked our claim checks.  Our bags had only been checked through to Newark.  Uh oh ... not only did that mean we had to figure out why, our bags would come in the second wave with the non-connecting-flight bags.  Our 1.5-hour layover was looking rather short.

We finally retrieved our bags and made it through customs.  We went to the United service desk.  When I asked what was going on, the agent said, "we don't have a flight to MSP tonight."  What!?  She said that flight was taken out of the schedule, but she could rebook us on a flight to MSP tomorrow morning (we aren't already rebooked?!).  Glimpses of what it would take to find a hotel room in NYC (the night of the baseball All-Star game no less) flashed through my head.  I asked if they could get us to MSP tonight through O'Hare.  She said, yes, but you'll have to hurry.  She quickly called another agent over, we got our boarding passes, we asked a porter to make sure our bags got onto the belt (as I handed him $20), and we rushed to security and then to our departure gate.  We made it!

While on the flight to O'Hare, I looked at my boarding passes.  (For some reason, I was the only one that had a boarding pass to MSP.)  Our flight was due to arrive at 9:40p and then our flight to MSP was to depart at 10:00p ... a 20-minute connection in O'Hare?  Is that even possible!?  Oh, and our flight was about 20 minutes late in departing Newark :-(

I alerted the flight attendant about our predicament who, upon landing, made an announcement about some passengers having a tight connection and to please stay in their seats if they could so that we could get off.  This mostly worked, but with out flight arriving a few minutes late, everyone was a bit anxious.  When we got off the plane and oriented ourselves, I basically took off on a sprint in the hopes that I could get them to hold the flight to MSP.  It was a solid 10-12 minutes of running (Terminal 3 to Terminal 1 for you frequent fliers).  I arrived about 9 minutes before departure as they were making the "last call to board."  I explained what was going on and they said, "but you don't have seats -- you are on stand by."  Argh!  Luckily, they had room for all four of us and they printed our boarding passes while we waited for Sue and kids to arrive.  Finally I saw them round the corner and in a minute we were all on board and seated together!  It was a tough connection -- everyone was sweaty and tired, but it was worth it and we made it.

Funny thing, and I guess I should feel good about this if it would have been us, they waited about 10 more minutes for another family from our Newark flight to make it to the flight to MSP.  And then they announced that they were waiting another 20 minutes for some late-arriving bags.  So, maybe we didn't need to run after all!

The rest of the trip was uneventful.  We retrieved our bags, the shuttle to the hotel near the airport was waiting for us, check in was smooth, and we were in bed and asleep in pretty short order.  I calculated that our trip was about 20.5 hours door to door (11a Graz time to 12:30a MSP, which was 7:30a Graz time!).  A long day indeed.