Neil's Flight

I started my series of flights at the Canton Akron airport. The first problem started right at the start when receiving my boarding passes. I wasn't able to get all three at the same time because my itinerary wasn't "in sync". I would have to get my next boarding pass at the next stop in Chicago, but my flight was only twenty minutes delayed which was a welcome change from the 3 hours that one passenger with Internet access thought it would be based on the Chicago departures.

I arrived in Chicago by 8pm and found the gate where my plane was scheduled to leave from pretty easily but when I arrived the gate was packed with people. It turns out that the flight scheduled to leave for Frankfurt at 6pm hadn't left yet because of maintenance issues and they were in our planes spot.

We waited and waited and at 10:30pm they informed us that the plane for Frankfurt would be boarding soon and that the reason we hadn't moved or gone to another gate was that the plane was the longest commercial plane and that it only fit at two gates at that airport and the other one was closed for repairs. So the plane for Frankfurt boarded and twenty minutes later its tired passengers disembarked. It was then that they decided to move the plane and make one of the other gates fit the plane. We all moved to the new gate and waited 45 minutes for them to get the new gate to fit on our plane. It was during this time that I had a nice conversation with a man who was visiting his family in Nuremberg. He had been born in the Sudentanland in 1936 and moved to the United States at an early age.

The gate finally attached and we took off four hours late. This was worrisome considering I only had a three hour layover in Munich. The flight went without issue and I even had a nice conversation with a polish woman was was going to visit her mother before she died. She talked a lot about trying to get her children to learn polish when they were young and now that some ate older they wish they had stuck with it.

When I landed in Munich an hour late for my flight I did what I was instructed to do and waited in the two hour line at the Luftansa desk for my next instructions. While waiting in line I was able to reach George and Jana to let them know I wasn't on the plane. "We know" they said, "it hasn't left yet." they told me the gate it was at and I ran there as fast as I could... And missed it, by two minutes. I went back and waited in the line again starting over from the back. Eventually I was able to talk to someone at the desk and they were able to schedule me on the next flight to Prague at 8pm.

I arrived in Prague at 9:30 but without my luggage. George was waiting for me at the gate and we went to a restaurant near his place and ate pretty decent hamburgers for the Czech Republic.