Wednesday, August 31, 2016

After two long days, we have finally arrived in Oslo, albeit without our luggage!  Flight delays in Chicago meant we would not make our connection to Oslo from Newark, so we re-booked through Frankfurt, Germany and on to Oslo.  The wonderful gate agent in Chicago located our bags (via phone) and assured us that they'd be on our flights; therein lay our second glitch.  As we landed in Frankfurt, we received text messages alerting us that our bags had not made it there.

This all paled in comparison to the announcement by our pilot after we landed that there was a bomb scare at our terminal in Frankfurt and that the entire ENORMOUS terminal had been evacuated. His reports indicated that it was chaos in the terminal, and they were trying to arrange buses to take us to other terminals.  After an hour on the tarmac, we did make it to another terminal, along with what seemed like half of the passengers flying anywhere in Europe today.

After several hours in a crush of people, we made it through security again and on to our original gate, where every passenger who'd been set to fly on our original (now cancelled) flight to Oslo was re-booking through one gate attendant!  The line barely moved, but we eventually got on to a flight four hours after our original re-booked one!

We finally arrived in Oslo as evening was falling, and after ascertaining that our bags had not arrived -- indeed, that no report was in the system! -- we got the process started, picked up our car, and drove the 45 miles into the central city.  We walked into our apartment at 10:00 pm, armed with overnight kits from the airline and hopes that our bags will arrive tomorrow, as we leave the city on Friday morning.

There are lots of things to be thankful for in this tale of Murphy's Law.  There was no bomb, we are at our destination, we had changes of clothes in our carry-on bags, we had no deadlines we were trying to meet, and we were not traveling with young children.  It could have been so much worse!

We'll see what tomorrow brings..