Jingle Bells in the Brenner Pass- Part 3
Armed with my Italian sourced flight data, I approached the gate agent and explained that going to Chicago that evening seemed pointless; I needed to be rebooked for a departure next evening. He agreed and began the rebooking process only to come to a sudden stop. Exasperated he said there was a bit of problem—he could not get us into Torino until January 30th. Wait he said, I have an option. You fly from Cleveland to Chicago, Chicago to Washington Reagan, Reagan to Kennedy, Kennedy to Rio, Rio to a location Eastern Europe I fail to recall now, and from there to Torino.
I quickly responded that that appeared to be a theoretical option—not a practical one. He agreed. How about Milan I asked. That turned out to be an easy alternative and was only slightly further from our destination of Alba than Torino. However, the agent was rather persistent in suggesting that we take the 7:30 AM flight to Chicago rather than the many other options later in the day. We kept explaining that friends were taking us to the airport and it was hard to justify asking them to get up in the middle of the night to get us to the airport—particularly since they were had already brought us here and were going to have to pick us up.
The agent finally decided to put us up at the airport hotel and pay for dinner so we could take the 7:30 AM flight. He seemed convinced that none of the 3 or 4 other options later in the day were safe connections. Even in retrospect his concern seems to be a bit paranoid, but his solution limited additional burdens on our friends so we were happy to comply.
So, on the day we should have been arriving in Italy we were starting our journey. As our plane accelerated down the runway my wife expressed a sigh of relief, finally we are going to get there she said. As a seasoned traveler my autonomic response was: “We are not there yet.” The statement was a premonition of what was to come.
