At the Airport (part 2): The day of the flight

I miss those days when you were greeted at the airport by a crisply uniformed ticket agent who knew what he or she was doing. Now you are welcomed not-so-warmly by a machine that vaguely resembles R2D2 of Star Wars (I regard this as one of the signs pointing to the coming end of the present age). These machines just don’t understand your special needs, like technical incompetence. My greatest fear is entering the wrong data and canceling the entire flight – or at least voiding my own ticket. So this time I decided I’d avoid the machine altogether and printed up my boarding pass the night before at the hotel – a feat of which I am rather proud. 

There was another challenge that I knew I would face at the check-in counter that day. Given our panic the day before (when we left our bags on the bus – see last post) and being confronted with repeated messages over the airport PA system that any unattended personal items would be confiscated and the contents immediately destroyed, it is understandable that we had become rather neurotically attached to our luggage. So we felt some significant separation anxiety as we placed our bags on the scale to be checked aboard the plane.



And then we waited…and waited…and waited…for the low-echelon functionary behind the counter to take care of our bags (oh where are those well-trained, attentive ticket agents?). Finally I signaled to her that we were in fact right now existing here in front of her with obvious intentions to check our luggage (that by the fact that one of our bags rested on the scale) and could she please attend to us.



“Have you checked in yet?” She said motioning toward R2D2.



I thought I’d done that in the hotel last night. My sense of accomplishment was rapidly vanishing.



“We already have our boarding passes,” I said, rather hurt.



“You’ve got to check in anyway so we’ll know where you’re going."



Yeah, well I guess that does make sense. I’ll do anything not to arrive in Frankfurt and discover that our luggage is sitting somewhere on the outskirts of Katmandu. So I duly entered our confirmation number which I had the foresight to record in our travel folder.

The moment of pain had finally arrived as we watched our bags being swallowed up into the gaping yaw of one of the more ominous-looking machines in the airport. It then proceeded to fall through a black hole at the end of the conveyer belt. I could not shake the thought that somewhere in the subterranean caverns of Denver International Airport the only thing that stood between me and the possibility of a clean change of socks and underwear at our destination was a bored, low-wage laborer whose main thought was how he or she could beat the rush hour traffic home that evening.

The flight itself went really well. It took only 7.5 hours to reach Frankfurt from Chicago and we got in early. The plane was virtually empty. Every passenger in the extra leg-room section had a whole row of seats to themselves and there were some rows still left empty. At Frankfurt it took us three trains to get to Baden Baden. And here we are now practically recovered form our jet-lag and ready to continue our adventure.