By Sunday the 7th, I had gotten down to the two big suitcases, one box to me (and one to RI), and a carry-on messenger bag. Great! So I repacked it all, and weighed. Interesting fact: up to 50 lbs of bags on the plane, it’s a bag, or an extra bag, depending. 51 – 70, it’s overweight and there’s a charge. 71? Not going. My first bag was 69.4. Woo! My second … errored out the digital luggage scale. At 9 am. With the airport run scheduled for 11. After an hour of weeding, I got it down to 76 lbs. God knows what it was before. Another hour … and I was under 70 lbs, barely, but then had to package up all the crap I’d just jettisoned to get it out of Deb’s house.
Oh. And during all this? Delta was contacting me, telling me, sequentially, my 1st (of 3) flights was scheduled to be 90-ish minutes delayed in departing. So my JFK connection wouldn’t work. Fortunately for me, they re-booked me before they even told me, but the new layovers (5 hours in JFK, 4.5 in Amsterdam) pushed my arrival from Monday morning to Monday after business hours. This is an issue because I’m supposed to go to the school to pick up my keys to my dorm room. Okay, no worries, this will be worked out, 1st priority is the airport. And getting gone in enough time that Deb can get to the store and home again to prep for her lunch guests!
We got me to the airport by about 11:40, at a guess, plenty of time for a 1:29 flight and TONS of time for a 3:00 schedule delayed departure time! Went to check in, paid for and checked my bags just fine, but the system, which gave me no grief online the night before, balked at checking someone in for an international trip with a one way ticket and no visa. I don’t need a visa. I’m from the US. I can stay 2 months (or 6? Something like that) as a tourist with no need for additional documentation! Anyway. They did check me in, but only as far as Amsterdam. The last flight, from Amsterdam to Hanover, was on KLM … which was fine for JFK to Amsterdam, but apparently no farther? Okay. Fine. Whatever.
So I flew. The flights were largely unremarkable, other than my being so stressed that I had a tendency to start crying with little or no visible provocation. A nice text. A random thought … and the more tired I got, the more difficult it was to fight. So … it’s possible my seat-mates and other people in the gate waiting areas thought I was nuts. Which, okay, maybe I was nuts.
I arrived at JFK, found out the difference between gate 26 and B26 (oh, hell yes, there’s a HUGE difference), found the bus to terminal 4, the international terminal. Man. There are some cool airlines that fly in there, that I’ve never seen anywhere else. Pretty cool. And I settled in to wait. And wait. And wait.
I did, once my gate opened (about an hour before the flight) see if they could check me into the KLM flight, since the other Delta people told me this was a KLM flight I was boarding. Yup, KLM, but Delta staff & computer, and the two computer systems don’t talk until 3 hours before scheduled departure. Which … is awesome. My bags could go no problem, they were tagged all the way through, just not me!
And I flew again. I’m reasonably sure I didn’t sleep on either of the 1st two flights, beyond about an hour on the 2nd one. I did watch two movies, try not to cry and read. So productive!
Landed in Amsterdam. Following the recorded instructions, I went to a transfer kiosk to check-in … and it couldn’t find me, so I was directed to the transfer desk (which was about a half mile away, but whatever, it’s an airport). Finally, finally, finally they were able to check me in, and off I went to passport control.
As a general rule, I don’t have any problems at passport control. My last time through London I got grilled, but other than that it’s 2 questions and a stamp. This was exactly the same. Delta had me all worried!
Okay, it was the same until I went through there and had to go back through security with my messenger bag and my 3’ cardboard tube (which I miraculously managed to not lose. I can’t count how many times I left it and had to go back for it, but people literally didn’t see it. Ever. Scary?). My bag was so densely packed it was hand searched (and the guy was super puzzled by my tampons. I have no idea.) and THEN I was screened again, where they wanted to open the metal things with my jewelry in it and make sure I’m not planning to sell it. They also asked “what’s in the cardboard tube” … but I waved it around and said it’s a poster, and no one even took it to hold! Totally bizarre.
The extra search was actually nice, though, since it gave me an opportunity to re-pack my bag. It was way better organized afterwards.
And then I was through security and wandering toward my gate. Which was another bus-gate, though this time it was a flight specific bus, so you had to be there when they were ready to drive you to the plane. I’ve actually done that before, in China, but there they drove for, like, 15 minutes, maybe more, all the way to what I suspected was the original Shanghai airport. Or at least the previous, if not ‘original’.
Anyway. I settled in to wait, checked my email and discovered I would not be able to pick-up my keys. So I booked a hotel. About 5 minutes later my suite-mate, Marita, as yet un-met, got back to me saying sure, she’d absolutely pick-up my keys for me, but the reservation was non-refundable, so I called it good and moved on with my life. Looking back, actually, that was a super expensive few days, between the shipping and the over-weight bags and the hotel!
Right. Amsterdam. Took the bus to the plane, boarded, read for about a minute and passed out. Which is good since on the bus ride I’d been feeling woozy and thinking I might just fall over. I didn’t sleep long … but I missed the end of the boarding, the safety instructions and most of the taxi for takeoff. I only woke-up because my Kindle fell off my knee. Still, that 30 minutes or so was awesome, the flight was less than an hour and Bam! I was in Hanover!!
I love arriving from a Shengen-zone country. There’s nothing. No passport check, no customs, nada. Fun! Went to the luggage place. My first bag came really quickly. Then there was an announcement in German and everyone left, about half the plane, mobbed the desk. Apparently literally half the bags didn’t get loaded? Is that a thing? So we all filled out forms for our bags to be delivered.
On the one hand, having one of the two bags would make getting a taxi / getting to the hotel, the school and the dorm much easier. On the other … that’s half my stuff for an entire year! Eek! Even more fun: when I got to the hotel, checked-in and looked, it wasn’t the bag with my underwear. AWESOME.
Regardless. I was in Hanover in one piece, with a place to shower, sleep and an included meal in the morning. In other words, I was in heaven and I’d arrived.
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