Planes, Trains and Flight Delays

Friends, believe the hype. Travel in Summer 2022 is a new, ugly frontier. I had not intended to go Travel Nuts but somehow I managed to use my eight-week teacher summer to cram in maximum travel. Consider it some kind of atonement to my passport for my lack of movement in 2020 and 2021. 

In my crisscrossing of Europe and Central America, I experienced flight delays, lost luggage, a mid-Atlantic medical emergency (not me), a missed flight connection and an overnight 'weather' related flight cancelation. In all my years of flying, I've never experienced so much airport drama. 

The first leg of the summer holiday, literally the morning after my last day of school, took Paul and me to Italy for a tour of Bologna, Pistoia, Siena and Sardinia. BA had slightly other plans for my luggage. Google 'Heathrow Luggage Graveyard' to see what I mean--and how bad it could have been. After flight delays that saw us chilling plane-side next to the runway, we departed without half the flight's luggage but only found this out after waiting at the conveyor belt for an hour in Italy. After waiting in a queue for another hour, the harassed two-woman team in Bologna informed me it might be a week before we were reunited (if at all), that the airport refused to deliver my suitcase and I would need to come pick it up when I got The Call. 

I may have lost my shit. I may have cried. And then I dusted myself off, go to our accommodation, went to bed and woke up in the same clothing to go shopping the next morning. After trawling the cheaper shops of Bologna and acquiring a new set of essentials, I received a call that my suitcase had arrived, a neat 12-hours later. 

And so we journeyed back to the airport during the luggage room open hours that accommodated for a  two-hour Italian mid-afternoon coffee break. Not joking. We joined the back of a 25-person queue that moved at a glacial pace. Some people had received a call their luggage was there, some people had no clue where their luggage was. An American family in front of us flew Lufthansa the night before--the plane left without anyone's luggage and no one could tell them where any of it was. They were travelling down the country to visit children in Florence so they wouldn't even be in Bologna for long. When they eventually got to the front of the queue, they received no resolution. 

After 3-hours in the queue, we reached spitting distance of the front...half an hour before 'coffee break time.' Half an hour later, one overly loquacious Italian separated us from the front. The staff looked on miserably but didn't close the queue--in my bureaucracy-fuelled rage, I would have refused to move anyway. 

And finally, after a 30-minute taxi ride and 3.5 hours in a poorly ventilated, dimly lit corridor, me and old blue were reunited. 

In the grand scheme of travel drama, being temporarily parted with your luggage is not generally a big deal. It's happened to me several times before. But the school year was long, my sanity was at a very low ebb, the Heathrow graveyard photos haunted my already overactive imagination and Italian bureaucracy encouraged me to think the worst.

One crucial lesson learned here. Always pack a spare pair of pants in your carry on. We have reached the age of travel chaos. In fact, you might as well pack a few days' worth of clothes. Summer's later flight encouraged me to add snacks to that list as well. But that's a story for another day.