Day 22-23: The Long Way Home

Friday, August 26 and Saturday, August 27

Nothing is less exciting to read about than someone’s else’s OR your own past air travel travails, especially this summer, when seemingly all air and some ground transportation is plagued by delays, cancellations, lost luggage, etc., most of which related to limited staff and the totally justified refusal of airport and airline personnel to work insane hours, sometimes without additional compensation. So let me just say that just like Mark, I had to spend an additional night in Heathrow because I could not make my connecting flight work, and that standing in line for forever to get rebooked was not fun. But the hotel was fine; after some anxiety in the morning about shuttle buses to the wrong terminal and underground rides, I got off ok; the flight was long and boring, but in Denver I had the great good luck to get through the entire obstacle course (immigration, customs, going back through the security, getting to the furthest possible gate in whatever concourse and terminal) super fast and get a seat on an earlier flight to Lincoln than the one I was booked on. So all in all, all went well, starting Friday morning at 9 am German time (my friend Andrea was really sweet and came with me all the way to the airport to say goodbye) and landing in Lincoln Saturday evening 6 pm CST, welcomed home by a very happy Mark and two extremely affectionate cats.

And my biggest travel tip/insight: traveling only with carry on (one little roller bag for me, one for Mark, and backpacks as our personal items) was the best thing we could have done, and I’ll never go back to a checked suitcase. We’ll also go back to flying to Amsterdam or Frankfurt and taking a train from there. The extra flight into Hamburg obviously caused all our issues upon returning, as convenient as it was when it worked as planned on arrival. And with that, the summer blog season has officially ended!