Boring post about our trip home
The next day we awoke and finished packing and watched the show “Three and a half men” in Turkish. At one point, a character said the word “ass face” and Jim promptly went out to the lobby and repeated it (in Turkish) to Mehmet. I was embarrassed and thankfully Mehmet didn’t really get what he was saying anyway. Jim is such a nerd!!
We finished packing, said goodbye to Mehmet and went to the airport. We purposely left really early to have some time to shop Duty Free.
We had a horrible schedule – Istanbul to Frankfurt to Washington DC to NYC!! When we checked into Lufthansa we asked if there was any way to get a better routing. The women behind the counter worked on it a long time and we started to get excited that maybe it would actually work. Then they broke the news – Jim was checked in, but my itinerary had been cancelled. Uhhh – scuse me????
For some reason, they had me scheduled on an earlier flight that day, and when I didn’t show up, they cancelled the whole thing. I had no idea what they were talking about. To make things worse, they said the flight to Frankfurt was full so they could only put me on a waiting list.
They sent me over to the Lufthansa ticket counter who couldn’t help me since I was flying on an United award ticket. They gave me the phone number to United in Germany (since there were no United offices in Istanbul.) It took me several tries to get the number right and finally I talked to someone who looked up my itinerary and said everything was FINE and that it was NOT cancelled.
What?!?!
So I went back to Lufthansa and told them what United said, and they were basically like, “Oh, ok.” So I got on the flight and they checked me in. HUH?????? I still don’t understand what the hell happened but it ended up being ok, thank goodness.
Because of the debacle we had NO extra time to go to Duty Free and we weren’t able to buy a thing.
But things got better.
As we were about to board the plane, we handed our tickets to the lady at the gate and she put a sticker on mine and said “You’ve been upgraded.” I literally was like, “WHAT??!!” and had to focus not to jump around and scream. I have never been upgraded before and it was a dream to be upgraded someday. I never ever thought it would happen an an award ticket either! I said to Jim, “see ya sucker!” but then she upgraded him too. Being in business/first class whatever (I don’t know) was nice, but the only thing that seemed any different was the food. It was good. But I tend to like airline food anyway (something about it being in little compartments.)
As we were about to land in Frankfurt, I had Kraftwerk songs like Autobahn stuck in my head. Isn’t that weird?
We had to go through a crazy amount of thorough security checks in Frankfurt. After that, things were pretty uneventful. We got home late and went to bed and our 2006 Trip was officially over.
I want to do Egypt next year – no – I NEED to do it. We were just too close. Right now were are thinking of doing a week in Egypt and combining it with a little trip somewhere else. But we’ve got a lot of time to figure it out.
I asked Jim if he thinks we’ll ever take an extended trip like we did in 2004. He paused but said, “yeah.” And I agreed.
Tags: Turkey 2006
Kelly
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