Lucky Travel

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This trip begins with the end to another. Alex and I have finished an excursion visiting his family for the holidays in Oklahoma and just now mine in Minnesota/Wisconsin. We left late New Years Eve to fly from the Minneapolis St Paul airport with my parents kindly opting to listen to the Wild hockey game instead of watching to prevent a hefty Uber cost. After dropping us off, Alex and I went to check in to our Cancun flight through Spirit that gave us a nice overnight layover in Dallas Fort Worth for the night. When buying the tickets, boy was I proud of myself - getting 2 flights for the price of 1! Not only did we get to not pay for the cost of a direct flight back to DFW from MSP, but we even get bags paid for two flights and a chance to switch out clothes! So here comes my bad travel luck and Alex's balancing good travel luck.

We mosey up to the Spirit ticket counter with our DFW vouchers and bags in hand. The desk clerk puts us into the system and then asks for our passports. I look at him with unease and explain that we don't have any because they are in DFW, where we live, packed in my bag for the next leg of the trip. So we bounced from him to the supervisor, who eventually called their manager. Luckily, I had digital copies of our passports they were willing to take in the current leg with the need for us to bring them to the airport in DFW. Since they asked for our normal IDs to confirm our identities prior to this approval, the man knew Alex was military and apparently Spirit offers 2 free checked and 1 free carry-on for military. He comped us our bags! However, Alex realizes AFTER the bags are tagged and thrown into the conveyor to our plane that the clerk put a transfer tag on them. I was expecting to pick them up in DFW to repack. What were we going to do with sweaters, jeans, and Christmas presents in Cancun?!?

This began the Bobbi stressed out trip back home. The clerk said that he couldn't help us but hopefully the Spirit crew at DFW could. As Alex's luck would have it, Spirit's hub is DFW so they have a Baggage Claim desk there open from 6am - 1:30am each business day. I began my calling spree. In the hour and a half before our flight I called 6 times without someone picking up and that was not getting a call back after leaving a message the very first one to contact me about getting our bags in DFW. Between reading, reminiscing about Mall of America, and remembering snow tubing, I was stressing the whole flight to Texas. While I chose not to bug the airline attendants and Alex refused to run down onto the tarmac to find the bags, I cornered the Spirit helper right at the arrival gate for her help. She called and talked to someone then directed us to the Spirit baggage desk by baggage claim. Thank our lucky stars, the lady was actually at the desk and got our bags routed to the carousel instead of night storage. Success!

Eventually we made it back to our car and home by midnight to unpack and repack for Cancun. Then after grabbing about 4 hours of sleep, we would be off again. Pray we didn't miss packing anything too critical.

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