And here is where it starts to become ridiculous...

Well, that was…interesting. Right after I finished taking another go around of the airport, we heard over the loudspeaker, “Ann and Kyle Weakland, please pick up a white courtesy phone.”  Finding one, and then picking it up, I heard the message, “Neil needs you to call as soon as possible.” My first thoughts were, “Who died? Is the car wrecked? Were we robbed?”

            Meanwhile, I notice that our previously deserted Airport Hobo Camp (as Kyle called it) is all of a sudden filling with people. That should have been our first clue something was up.

            Having no internet, and no phone, we had to use a pay phone (“Think like we’re in the ‘90s,” said Kyle). Seeing as how we had no change, and no one in the airport would change us a dollar, we had to buy some peanuts and junk from the vending machines to get money. After some fumbling around, we finally managed to get 4 minutes with Neil. What does he say? “Your flight’s been cancelled.”

            Being simultaneously alarmed and relieved, we trucked our way back to customer service (again) and, lo and behold, the flight to Frankfort’s plane had had maintenance issues (remember the sorry state of our plane into Detroit?), and they had given our plane to them. We got on a phone to re-book, and they got us on a flight…in 2 days. As Kyle said, “Are you kidding?”

            Kyle and the airline agent talked some more and got us a flight…in 10 minutes! Not gonna happen. We finally booked a flight for tomorrow morning on American Airlines. We talked to a lovely agent, pulling out the random scraps of paper we had been given throughout this crazy day and thrusting them at her; she got us a hotel room and overnight kit, and rerouted our bags. I still expect our bags to be lost.

            We wandered around trying to find the shuttle terminal. At one point, we were in a revolving door and I accidentally touched the glass, stopping the door, trapping us. Usually, you just move forward and it starts again. Not here. And the international arrivals just stared at us as we gesticulate wildly like, “Silly Americans in a glass box.” Finally, the girl from the duty free shop freed us.

            We made the shuttle, along with our travel buddy, who we had met at customer service. She informed us that our agent remembered after we left that she hadn’t given us our baggage tags. Sigh.

            We checked into the hotel (which had an oddly large amount of…forestry), found our room, went to the hotel restaurant/bar and shoved BLTs down our throats. Rebuffing some inebriated people who though that we worked for the hotel, we went back to our room, tried to update our loved ones, donned the giant T-shirts the airline had given us (which I thought made us look like mental patients), and went to bed.

            Getting up at 4:00 am, we took the shuttle to the airport, went through security again (gentle thigh pat), and now we are waiting for a connecting flight to Chicago. God help us.