Sunday, February 22, 2009

Winter travel: Part 2

I'm in Toronto right now. It is 5:37 am and I've been wide awake for an hour thanks to jet lag.

I arrived here around 11 pm (Toronto time) Friday night after a very long and frustrating travel day.

My trip started off well enough Friday morning. I got up sometime around 6 am, the taxi arrived promptly at 7 and I made it to the airport and checked in without incident. I did note as I left the house that it was snowing, but that didn't worry me.

It should have.

After I checked in the clerk mentioned that my flight was about 15 minutes late arriving. Three hours later I finally boarded the bus to take me to my first flight to Munich. Apparently a snowstorm in Munich had slowed all traffic in and out of that airport, so I had hopes that my Canadian flight, which was supposed to leave shortly after I finally left Krakow, would be delayed long enough for me to make it.

No such luck. It left one minute before I arrived in Munich.

Then I was rerouted to Frankfurt to wait for another flight to Toronto. I boarded that flight on time, but it ended up leaving an hour or so late because of various difficulties, my favourite being the plane parked behind ours, which meant we couldn't back away from the gate.

Finally 20 some odd hours after leaving my home in Krakow, I arrived in Toronto, only to discover that my luggage hadn't.

Thirty-some hours later it still hasn't appeared. I just checked the baggage tracer online and the status is still showing as tracing in progress, which means they don't know where my bags are. When I called to check on them yesterday, the clerk told me that they had located one of my bags and it would arrive tonight (48 hours after me), but that they didn't know where the other one was yet.

And, somehow while sitting on the plane, I managed to rip the knee out of the only pair of pants I now have.

Ain't air travel grand?

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