Day 76: Flying to New York!

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Our flight to New York was at 10.45am, so we caught a shuttle in the morning to the airport and ended up getting there really early for a domestic flight. Thank goodness we did because we were in for a day of drama! The first thing we discovered when we went to check in was that our flight was cancelled and we had been re-booked on another flight at the same time. That was all good, but it meant we had to wait in line to be re-issued our tickets behind a huge group of non English speaking people who took a very long time. Once we got to the counter we discovered we had to pay $25 to check in our bags, which we weren't thrilled about because we didn't know our flight had been booked without it included. So we continued to the x-ray machines with our new tickets and all was ok. Because we were on a domestic flight we had decided to carry our heavy moisturiser etc as carry on luggage to save space in our main packs, however.....we didn't know that in the US you can't take liquids over 100mls on board domestic flights so we were made to throw out all of our toiletries!! It was particularly devestating for me because I had bought $60 worth of toiletries at Walmart because it was so cheap, and I had to throw them all out unopened!! I was really gutted, but there was no time to go back and check them in.
We then had to catch a train to our gate, and by this stage we are in a massive hurry because of all our hold ups. So we raced through the airport only to find we made it to our gate at 10.44, 4 minutes after the gate had shut for our 10.55 flight, so we missed our flight. It was incredibly frustrating because we could see the plane still sitting at the gate. After talking to a lady at the counter she put us on another flight, luckily for no extra charge, which left at 4.30pm.
So we found ourselves with nearly 6 hours to kill in the airport lounge. I tried to go back and fish my toiletries out of the bin to take them to the check in counter, but I was told that once I'd given them up I couldn't get them back, so we spent the day catching up with friends and family on skype and it went pretty fast. We got on the flight finally, and arrived at New York at 11.45pm. Our bags had gone on our original flight that we missed, so we had to walk to another terminal to pick them up. We found Susan, whose house we were staying at, who had kindly come to pick us up and we got to her place in New Jersey at 2am. By about 3am we finally fell into bed exhausted after a really long and problem filled day, but the main thing was we had made it to New York safely!

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