Wednesday December 27: To Boston
Luggage Mistake
We are about to start our long journey home. Fortunately, we have a fairly late flight, so we had a mellow morning.
We slept well enough and long enough, and then we had a mellow breakfast. Unfortunately, Amy’s stomach was not too pleased with the idea of breakfast. Interestingly, just down the hall from us, there are two chairs in the hallway, occupied by two very serious looking police officers. We have to wonder who is in the room that they seem to be guarding.
We didn’t recognize too many people at breakfast, which isn’t surprising, as most of them are either flying out earlier than us, or going on trip extensions.
We came back up to the room and did our final packing. This was a bit tricky, as we are returning with more stuff than we came with, and we had both weight and volume constraints. Amy’s checked suitcase was too heavy, so we moved some stuff from there to my checked suitcase. Then, as one might guess, my suitcase was too heavy. I had to move some stuff from my checked bag to my carry-on, which was facing some volume constraints. Eventually, the game of musical chairs subsided, and I think we have a viable configuration of stuff. We have just about an hour to kill before the fun begins.
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We are now in the lower lobby awaiting our pickup. They are constructing some sort of scaffolding over the stairs up to the lobby. I’m not sure what they are going to be building or taking down. Strangely, there seems to be a number of guests who are stepping over the warning tape and walking up the stairs next to the workers. I took the elevator, even though it was fairly slow this morning. One woman kept pushing the button over and over again, as if that would make the elevator come any quicker.
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To rub salt into the wound, today we have a bright blue sky with hardly a cloud in sight. We haven’t had a sunny day since the first day in Paris, so now the sun comes out just as we are leaving to go home. At least yesterday, while we were walking around, it wasn’t raining on us.
We are here at the gate, waiting for our flight. On the way in, my stress level managed to go from 10% to 110% in a matter of seconds. For one of the first times ever, they weighed our carry-on bags. Mine was too heavy, so I had to check it. That was bad enough, but I remembered about 10 seconds too late that I had been proactive in cleaning out my pockets, and I had put my cell phone into the (unlocked) pocket of my carry-on bag. I didn’t even realize that there was a weight limit for the carry-on bag.
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Not only do I not have it to occupy my time while I’m waiting in the terminal, but I have to worry about it being stolen before we get to Boston. There is of course the not insubstantial cost of replacing it if it gets stolen, but more significantly, I think I took more than half the pictures from the trip on my phone. I’m not sure how many if any were uploaded to the iCloud. So now I get to spend about 12 hours wondering whether or not my phone will still be there when we get to Boston.
It is amazing how much of our lives are wrapped up in our phones. I was thinking that I can’t play any of my phone games while I’m waiting, but at least I can listen to my book. Then I remembered that of course I *can’t* listen to my book, because it is on my phone!
There was just an announcement about our flight. Apparently it is rather full, so they said that some of the larger carry-on bags might be stopped and checked for no charge. We should make sure that we remove from those bags things that are valuable or fragile. This really made me clench my teeth because just about *everything* in my checked “carry-on” bag is valuable *and* fragile.
I think what might have done me is in that when my checked bag was too heavy, I moved my hiking boots from there to my carry-on bag. Without those, it probably would have been light enough. My other thought is that if I had put the boot on and put my sneakers in my bag, it might have been light enough.
Thinking back, there are lots of things that I could have done differently, but I was not expecting any issues, and I don’t think that well when there is a time crunch and I’m flustered.
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We just had an interesting experience transiting though Munich. I think I had my first missed-approach/go-around. We were stable, the landing gear was down, and the flaps were set for landing. I’m guessing we were maybe 30 seconds from touch-down. Suddenly, I felt and heard the engines spool up. The nose rose up and then the flaps retracted. I was thinking, “A go-around??? This can’t be good.”
The stewardess came on and said something about a plane still on the runway. A bit later, the pilot came on and said something about a tail wind. In any event, we did a big oval, tried again, and this time we landed without incident. This was mildly annoying as we already had a short layover, and now it was about 10 minutes shorter. Over the PA they warned us that for people connecting to the USA, plan extra time due to enhanced security to the USA.
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We landed, got off the plane, and hightailed it to another concourse. This involved lots of walking, multiple escalators, and an automated train. Because of Amy’s carry-on, we just stood on the escalators, but lots of people where hurrying past us, apparently desperate to not miss their flight.
We didn’t have to go through security again, but we did have to go through passport control. With US passports, we could go through an automated machine. Amy got in one stall, and I went in the next one. I went through quickly with no trouble. After getting my passport stamped, I turned around and saw that Amy was having some sort of trouble with the machine. Unfortunately, there was no way I could retrace my steps and help her. She flubbed around a bit, tried a different machine, and eventually got it to work.
We then had another sprint down a long concourse, and we reached the plane as it was already boarding business class. With the landing delay, this was one of the shortest layovers I’ve experienced. Now I just need to hope that our luggage made it and that my phone is still in my bag.
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The plane (A340?) was interesting. Rather than having a few toilets in the main cabin, they had a small set of stairs that took you to a lower area, where there were 5-6 toilets. I have to wonder whether the space used up by the staircase was that much smaller than just putting the toilets on the main level. It certainly ate into luggage space, although probably the luggage space is not packed. In any event, I’ve never seen that approach before. It is sort of like the hump on 747s, but the stairs go down to toilets rather than up to first class.
It turns out that after a lot of fretting, my prayers were answered, and when we got to Boston, all of our luggage was there, including my “carry-on” bag, *and* my phone was safe in the pocket where I had left it.
The weather was very similar to our German weather. It is sort of rainy but not that cold.
This was a busy night for Knight’s Limo (the shared van service). About when we got there, two Knight’s vans pulled up, but neither was ours. He checked, and ours was on the way. The third van pulled in about a minute later. It was already full of people. We joined them and headed home.