Day Eleven (January 2)

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I didn’t make many friends when I woke everyone at 6:00 am, but we had a busy day ahead of us. I hate to admit it, but I get kind of hyper in these situations. When there’s a situation requiring my absolutely having to be there at a set time, I over-react and try to get there long before I need to. Our flight wasn’t scheduled to leave Frankfurt until 12:05 but I try to observe the airlines’ recommendation that you get there three hours before departure. If there is a cancellation or a heavily-booked flight, I like to be at the top of the list for boarding compensation and/or re-routing. According to Mappy.com, our hotel was about an hour from the airport. I also allowed half an hour for refueling the car and car rental return. I also wanted to get through airport security before it got crazy. Gail hoped to take care of her VAT refund on her Swarovski stuff at the airport.

While everyone else was still sleepwalking through their morning ablutions, I started loading the bags in the car. We were ready to drive off the second we finished breakfast. I worried a little that we might be waiting around to eat or that we wouldn’t get much, but I had done that the entire trip and was wrong each time. This was no exception. The table was set for us when we came into the bar/breakfast room. We had a huge basket of bread (rye, white and pumpernickel) and hard rolls. The condiment bowl was full of jelly, margarine, butter and honey. Less than a minute after we sat down, the same girl we had spoken to late the night before came in with a tray of four different meats and three kinds of cheese. We ordered hot chocolate and coffee which came quickly along with orange juice. Being good little tourists, we finished almost everything on the table. We were out of there and on the road a few minutes after 7:00.

I never considered the possibility of encountering a Stau (German traffic jam) when doing my calculations. Germany has become notorious for them lately and here we were about to drive toward a major metropolitan area on a Monday morning. But we had smooth sailing all the way. Perhaps with this being the 2nd of January people were still off from work for the Holidays. Helga did a fantastic job of getting us to the airport. Unfortunately, I was hoping to spot a petrol station before we reached the airport so I could top off the gas tank. We saw nothing. We were at the airport terminals so quickly we had to bail out and started searching for a gas station. By now Gail was getting pretty proficient with the GPS. She set it up to point out the nearest gas station. It said an Esso was nearby. In a unmitigated act of defiance, perhaps because we were leaving her, Helga screwed us up big time. I swear she didn’t want us to go. She kept telling us to turn left which we did each time. We ended up driving around in a circle around a big parking garage. We circled three times. It was now 9:00. My original plan had us checked-in by 9:00. We ignored Helga’s directions the second time around yet we still somehow ended up going around the block. Finally we decided to bear right up a “bus only” lane. That got us back to the main drag. We shut-off Helga, pulled out the CD, and locked her in the glove box. Auf Wiedersehen!

We ended-up heading off the airport property where we came to a traffic circle. On the other side of it was an Esso. It looked just like a Wawa gas station and convenience store back home. There had to be twenty pumps. Naturally this station had the highest prices we had seen all trip. I was getting extremely perturbed by this point so even though the diesel was 1.10€ per liter, I wasn’t about to go exploring for alternatives with time running out. I filled her to the brim because we had been told that Alamo would charge us 1.50€ per litre if we returned it unfilled. Two months later I’m still trying to pay off that 50€ ($61.00) fill-up that I put on my Visa. When I went inside the store to pay I stood in line at least five minutes while the guy in front of me pulled-out some sort of Liberian scrip to pay his gas bill. Finally, at 9:21 I pulled out of the Esso.

We were now pretty familiar with the airport so we found the car return quickly. At some point in our journey Gail had very carefully popped back the sideview mirror I had knocked-off in Ramsau. It functioned perfectly and only carried the cracks and scratches that we noted when we picked-up the car. A parking lot attendant gave the car a quick check and initialed our rental agreement. We had a long walk from the car rental return parking area to the Alamo return desk. Gail took care of that while I sat with the bags. After a couple minutes she called me over to the desk. The Alamo girl claimed the car had damage. She couldn’t come up with the English word for what we supposedly wrecked. I’m thinking “mirror, mirror, we wrecked the stinkin’ mirror!!!” and had to mentally pinch myself to stay quiet. She called her supervisor over and she said a lens was missing. What? We said the check-in guy told us everything was ok. The supervisor called up to the return area and spoke to the guy who now said the car was missing a lens for one of the fog lights. I didn’t even know the thing had fog lamps. We pointed out all the damage already listed on the rental agreement when we picked-up the car. After a few more minutes of consultation the supervisor told us everything was ok and “no charge”.

It was 10:00 and we still hadn’t checked in. We had to walk another thousand yards to get from the car return in terminal C to the US Airways desk in Terminal A. Now I was in a full panic. When Cassie finally spotted the U.S. Air sign we could see a line of perhaps twenty people waiting to check-in. That really wasn’t many people but in my anxiety about being late I almost gave myself a heart attack. Almost as soon as we got in line, a ticket agent walked up to us and asked where we were going. When we said “Philadelphia” he smiled and said “You wouldn’t be interested in denied boarding compensation would you?” Duh. All of us volunteered even though Cassie and Gail had to be back at school the next day. They checked us in just as if we would be going but instead of the normal bag tags we got orange ones put on indicating that they should be pulled if we were bumped off the flight. We tried not to get too eager only to have our hopes dashed once again.

While we had been waiting in line we heard a good number of people behind us offer to accept denied boarding too. It looked like the flight was seriously overbooked. We got through security after another eternity. The American family in front of us at the metal detectors had so many chains around their neck, earrings, piercings and other jewelry that it took us another 15 minutes to get through there. And all this time I was carrying my rather full backpack, my heavy down jacket and that stupid can of beer. I was concerned they might confiscate my beer for some reason so that added to my apprehension. Once our turn came they didn’t look twice at my beer or all my electronic junk in my backpack. We had a leisurely hour to sit around in the huge shopping and dining area inside security. I searched for some wine to bring back. Since none of the booze I saw was really a great deal and not wanting to add more stuff to the pile I had to carry I passed. They were very late in posting our departure gate. It was after 11:30 when the monitors finally indicated our gate. That was another long, long walk lugging all my cumbersome valuables.

When we got to our gate, there were perhaps 25 people sitting on the floor or leaning on the wall just before the desk of gate agents. This was where all the stand-by passengers were supposed to wait. Past the desk we could see the waiting area was completely packed with people. In my annoyed state I was really fuming about our chances of getting denied compensation. I wanted to know right away. There are two frames of mind I might have to adjust to: working myself up for an 8 hour trip inside a stuffy box back to Philadelphia, picking up our car, followed by a two hour drive back to our house stopping at my parents house on the way. OR adjusting to the idea of another day in Germany, where we would stay that night, what to do, how was Gail going to contact her school and would we get out the next day. For twenty minutes we sat around clueless. It turned out that many of the people sitting around in the stand-by section were bumped from flights the day before. They were hoping to take the seats our group might be giving up.

A few minutes before our scheduled departure time at noon, an announcement was made that there was a gate change. Four hundred people started running to the other side of the terminal. It we thought things were crowded at the previous gate…This was like a scene out of Dante’s Inferno. In a big room of about 150 feet by 200 feet almost a thousand people were crammed together. This area housed three gates that were set up not with jetways but with access to the tarmac outside. People leaving from this gate either walked to little commuter prop planes or boarded buses to the bigger jets parked elsewhere. Our Philadelphia bound group was mixed in with travelers attempting to get to Charlotte. It seems that since our plane had been overbooked by so many people we were switching planes with the Charlotte group. It took a half hour of pushing and shoving to finally get them out of the congested room and back over to our original gate. On two different occasions I saw U.S. Airways’ gate agents screaming at each other. A guy and girl agent almost came to blows. I thought she was going to throw down her walkie-talkie and walk-out of the job right on the spot. In the meantime I got myself psyched imagining the extra day in Germany and how I would spend my denied boarding compensation money.

It was after 1:00 when things finally seemed to calm down. Gate agents kept calling people over to give them their boarding passes. I was carefully watching and lisetening in hopes of hearing our names. Nothing. Just as the first group of passengers were being called to board the bus to the plane, I heard an agent waltzing through the room calling out “Genriyetta Feldmann and Phoebe Ferguson please”. She was carrying a clipboard. I directed her over to where Gail and her Mom were seated. U.S. Air was offering denied boarding only to those two. I knew there was no way Grandma wanted to stay here and I wasn’t sure Gen would feel comfortable without Tyler. U.S. Air let Tyler and Gen remain behind. It felt kind of weird seeing my little boy and his girlfriend walk off with the gate agent while we prepared to leave him behind in a foreign country. He and Gen were all smiles as we waved goodbye. I knew he was already calculating what new hardware he was going to buy to upgrade his computer. I got a little ticked-off to see a couple that had been behind us in the check-in line getting pulled aside for denied boarding. Now I just wanted to get out of this place.

We ended-up with great seats at the very back of the plane. As the Airbus fuselage tapers toward the tail seating goes from four across in the center to three across. Being in the first of the three across rows and on the aisle I had more legroom than usual. Our seats each had their own entertainment units. I watched three movies and a couple of old TV shows and still got bored. The flight back seemed to take forever.

Arriving back in Philadelphia we landed during a torrential rainstorm. Temperatures were well above freezing but the rain was incessant. The bad thing about being in those nicer seats at the back of the plane is that you have to wait a very long time before you get off. I wasn’t too upset though because I knew we’d have to wait for our bags anyhow. I love the people of Philadelphia because I think they are the friendliest big city people ever and I loved the way things went at Philadelphia International when we first left on this trip, but the return was pathetic. Besides a ridiculously long walk from the gate to immigration, of the perhaps twenty immigration desks, two were open for non-U.S. residents and only two for U.S. citizens. It took about 15 minutes to get through that mess. In the meantime Cassie got yelled at for trying to return a call on her cell phone. Apparently she didn’t hear the announcement when we landed. She was in the wrong but the person that yelled was a real jerk about it.

When we got to the baggage claim area it was more than a half hour after we landed. All 400 passengers were standing around the carousel. I would have assumed that since we were supposed to be among the group that might get pulled off the flight along with our bags, that our luggage would be the last on the plane. Last on/first off? That was the way it worked when I worked for Pan Am. We were among the very last to get our bags. We waited in baggage claim almost 45 minutes until we get our last bag. Fortunately, neither Gen’s nor Tyler’s bags showed-up.

As bad as that experience was, things got even worse. When we headed toward Customs we found the merry 400 still standing in a gigantic line. Only three Customs agents were open for business. At one point a new line opened but as soon as it opened, one of the others closed. It was ridiculous. Before long another international flight arrived and there were maybe 600 people waiting. There was no special line for those connecting to other flights. Those poor people might still be at the airport. With our flight leaving Germany an hour and a half late and then all these lines in Philly, I don’t know how anybody could make their ongoing connection. In Europe if you have nothing to declare you can be out of the airport in a minute. Here they had to ask us a bunch of questions. The Customs guy we had was pretty cool though. He admired my giant can of beer and told me to be careful with it. He warned me that the monks make a potent brew.

We got through Customs after maybe twenty minutes. It took us a couple more minutes attempting to find a way out. It didn’t take long to catch our shuttle bus to the off airport parking lot. The stupid thing was that they dropped us off at our car in the pouring rain. All the doors were locked. I had to walk over to the lot’s office to pay and get the keys while everyone stood out in the deluge.

After that, everything went smoothly. We stopped and checked up on my parents. My father was home from the hospital after his hip replacement. We only stayed a few minutes then headed home. We found our “good dog” alive and well. No property damage, no messes.

The next day I picked up the “bad dog” from the kennel. She was fine and forgave me for locking her away for all that time. I felt no jet lag at all. After Gail and Cassie returned from school, Gail, her Mom and I drove back down to Philadelphia to pick up Tyler. We assumed he’d be on the flight. I felt confident he would have notified us if he got bumped again. Sure enough, he and Gen showed up about 45 minutes after the flight landed. No problems in Immigration, baggage claim or customs. Tyler and Gen “lucked-out” all around.

For the “inconvenience” of getting bumped in Frankfurt, Tyler and Gen each received 300€ cash or $360.00. They could’ve taken 400€ credit on their next flight instead, but those two kids are very practical about money. They were given rooms in a beautiful modern NH hotel at the airport. They each also received 15€ food vouchers for lunch and dinner. Gen and Tyler went to McDonald’s for lunch and ordered 30€ worth of food. They ended up giving much of it away. The German McDonald’s was participating in the yearly Monopoly Sweepstakes game. Gen and Tyler received close to 30 game pieces due to the huge amount of food they ordered. They succeeded in winning three more free French fry orders as well as 2 free desserts. Later at the hotel they were so full from their feast at McDonald’s that they weren’t in the mood for dinner. Instead they spent their food vouchers on beer and wine at the hotel restaurant. With the cash settlement they received from U.S. Air they are now planning to take a Spring Break cruise through the Caribbean.

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Photos

Frankfurt Airport has the screwiest road system...
In looking for a gas station we just kept driving around in circles. We couldn't seem to find our way off the airport property.