Jingle Bells in the Brenner Pass- Part 2
With the location of Christmas settled, plans were made for arrivals. My wife and I would depart from Cleveland in the evening on December 20th arriving in Torino (Turin) Italy in the late afternoon of December 21st. Our oldest son would arrive from China in Torino. This would give us two days before Christmas and my son in China had arranged for us to meet many of his friends during that period. But that was not to be.
When we arrived at the airport in Cleveland, many feelings returned from my days as a traveling lawyer. I was Infinite Elite Platinum on Continental, so I had spent many hours in airports and planes. I had forgotten in the last three years since I retired that this was a rather taxing experience. Suddenly our phone rang; it was our son calling VOIP from Italy. He asked whether we knew that our plane to Chicago which was in Dulles had its departure delayed due to the snow storm that had battered the east coast. I did not, but I would ask the gate agent, who was not aware of the delay and had not updated the departure board. I could not miss the irony that I was better informed than an airline employee due to information I was getting from Italy.
Those of you who travel a lot will recognize that airlines typically post extremely optimistic estimated departure times which are gradually revised to much later realistic times. This may be a result of a lack of information, but I often suspected that it was designed to discourage passengers from looking into switching to another carrier.
Of course, the departure time of our flight to Chicago was finally revised to a time that dashed any hope that we would connect with our Lufthansa flight to Munich. When it became clear that the United agent still expected that we would all still be going to Chicago, my Italian source of flight data pointed out it would be pointless, because there were no flights to get me to Italy until the next night.
Read Part 1 of Larry's holiday travel experiences.
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