welcome back, your dreams were your ticket out

I left the rainy, cold Midwest on Friday at 10 to make it to the airport by 11 for a 13 flight to Newark where I would have 2.5 hours to switch to the overnight to Cologne with Continental. Scratch that plan.

I arrived at the airport, there is massive raining on the East coast, so my flight to Newark was delayed by 2 hours. By the time I found the check-in area it had gone to over 3 hours, so there was no way to make the international leg. At check-in they were pretty empty and the helpful agents got to work with how to re-route me.

There was an overnight from Continental to Manchester, England that left a little later that they could route me on, and then connect me over to Cologne. I would arrive in at 17.30. Instead of 08:30? Um...do you have anything a little closer to lunchtime? Well, Frankfurt perhaps, would be 14.30 instead. Um...how about D'dorf? Agent two then joins the game and has some ideas.

How do you feel about a bus to O'Hare? We'll give you a voucher and you're early enough. Well I'm not so fond of the behemoth that is Chicago because of all the lines and the big planes due to the volume of people moving through, but I can suck it up if it will get me back before lunch, so Chi-town it is.

So to Chicago I go and confuse the heck out of things because they had to issue me a paper ticket as the ticket I was traveling on was purchased in Euros and they are converting me to a different airline (United). And, I didn't need the second half of the roundtrip, because my work travel agency purchased it to drive down the cost because I only needed the first part, so Continental voided that as a part of this process. Are we surprised I triggered the 'special security test' from United's computers and was put in a special security line that included a pat-down that would rival those cheap feels in Germany's airports?

All goes well and I enjoy my middle seat at the back of the plane. I arrived at Heathrow, pass through to terminal 2, get my second paper ticket from Lufthansa and kill time wandering through the shops at 7 AM on Saturday trying to stay awake. My checked in bag, however, had other ideas and was not quite ready to return to Germany. Here's his tag. I'm not sure what exactly constitutes a 'Mini-rush', but maybe it has something to do with my TSA lock showing that it was opened and the form inside saying that the bag was checked.

Not to be outdone, the Germans also got into the act and left me a sticker. Because I arrived without my bag, it was delivered to me today at home.

As you would probably expect, I had some very important things in my bag, and all survived intact. For those not in the know, these are girl scout cookies. I eat one box a year, partly because I'm not really fond of sweets and partly because the recommended serving of these Samosa cookies is two cookies. These two cookies provide 25% of your saturated fat needs for the day.

One of my favorites of US television:

All Soft to deal with the harsh water here.

I introduced one of my German work colleagues to Oreos and since then he requests a package of the originals each time I go to the US. I took special consideration with Milk's Favorite Cookie and wrapped them in a sweater toward the center to protect them from getting squashed with my books. Either they didn't check so much or they also took care because the Oreos came back carefully positioned and protected in the center of the suitcase.