Planes and more planes

Woke before the alarm went off and just as well as I’d had an email notifying me that our flight from Tampa to JFK was delayed by 3 hours. The knocking effect was to make us miss the connecting transatlantic flight. 45 minutes on the phone later to the call centre and we were rebooked via Atlanta and Amsterdam with an unscheduled 7 hour layover in Schipol meaning we would get home till Sunday teatime instead of just after 9am. However the only other option was but to travel and instead travel on Sunday, nit getting home till Monday. So we went with it.

After dropping the rental cars (I drove 3 of the friends down in Michael’s car and Miss PHL ride with her dad), we headed to the assistance gate. The queue moved very slowly but we finally got our turn and after a slight shuffling of the contents of our suitcases to distribute the weight more evenly, we headed to the gate to get our seat allocations for the flights through to Amsterdam.

This is where we hit a snag as it turns out booking your flights through one carrier which code shares causes issues with say Delta seeing a Virgin flight or a KLM seating plan so our gate agent was only able to gives us seats in the flight to Altanta and we only had requested seats for our transatlantic crossing, we were directed to a supervisor who tried his best to get us on an earlier flight out of Atlanta (or elsewhere) so that we could make the earlier flight to Edinburgh just after 8 from Amsterdam. Still with me? It gets more complicated! He couldn’t sort it but suggested Altanta might have more luck.

So off we flew to Atlanta which is a huge airport and we had to change terminals to find out gate. The gate agent suggested Delra assistance could help. They couldn’t initially and sent us the 3 desks along to Virgin. The Virgin rep couldn’t have been less interested and sent us back to Delta. The agent was a bit annoyed at the Virgin rep but tried not to let us see and did start trying to help but had to call other people and eventually get a gate supervisor to give her an override code. Cue some frantic typing and we were on the earlier flight out if Altanta and had seats on the 8.10 flight to Edinburgh.

We all ended up in middle seats in different rows but KLM appears to have huge amounts of legroom so it wasn’t too uncomfortable, apart from the lack of arm space.

Not too shabby an international flight as I managed to watch 3 films (Maverick Top Gun, Belfast and the Duke) before Saturday turned to Sunday (on US. time).

Backblipped Sunday for Saturday