Jingle Bells in the Brenner Pass- Part 4
The good news—and what was going to be the only good news for some time, was that we were upgraded to Business First on our flight from Chicago to Munich. The flight from Chicago arrived in Munich on time. That was the last time, for the next two days, that anything we traveled on either arrived or left on time.
When we arrived in Munich everything appeared to be fine. The weather was cool but not cold and it was clear. Little did we know that over the Alps Mother Nature had decided to wreak havoc. We proceeded to the Lufthansa, Senator’s lounge to experience the dramatic improvement in airline lounges in Europe as contrasted with those in the United States. However, my wife was impatient. As a season traveler I had become accustomed to arriving at the plane just before they shut the door; she was not. So we proceeded toward the gate of our flight to Torino. Suddenly, the delayed designation appeared in the departure time. For those who don’t travel much delayed usually does not mean delayed. It means your fight has been cancelled but we wanted to break the news to you in stages.
When delayed sign appears for your flight, and they give you a new departure time, it is wise to ask the gate attendant where the equipment is at the present time. On numerous occasions they would post a new departure time 20 minutes later and I would ask where the equipment was and find out it was still on the ground, two hours flight time away. When I would ask the attendant how they could possibly post a 20 minute delay when it would take the plane a minimum 2 hours to get here assuming it was leaving as we spoke, I would get this amused look, suggesting I have figured out the punch line to the joke.
Of course, in the 10 minutes it took us to get to the gate, as you would expect the delayed departure had turned into a cancelled departure. Apparently, a vast snow storm on the other side of the Alps had shut down all air travel into and out of Northern Italy.
