Ireland/China 2025, ending

[aadler]

Last day in China, and getting back home – August 19-21

Our departure time was so late, Susan and I stayed more or less in our room for most of the day, taking meals in the lounge. It was about 5:40PM before we took our luggage and went down to the desk to check out, then made our way to the main airport to begin preparing for the flight out.

It was wearing. There were so many people leaving at the same time, we got routed to different lines and had to wait for quite a while … but, when the main rush slowed, someone came and steered us straight to the desk, where we checked Susan’s wheelchair and our main luggage. I asked about getting a seat upgrade for Susan, but the response was noncommittal, then we were escorted up to the departure gates.

We flew out at 11:00PM, on a flight that had every seat filled; fortunately, we were in an exit row, with plenty of legroom in front of us. (Susan’s TV monitor wasn’t working right, though, and had to be literally duct-taped in place to keep it upright.)

We arrived at Schipol Airport in Amsterdam, with a relatively short wait for the flight out. When I inquired (again) about getting a seat upgrade for Susan, I was told that I’d have to wait till the checkout gate opened and ask there. When an agent finally began working that gate, however, she told me I needed to go to the Transfer desk for Delta. And the agent at the Transfer desk said we couldn’t do anything of that type without having some kind of frequent flyer or special membership status. We’d got an upgrade on the flight to China, but that was on Air France; apparently, every airline has its own system, and it’s next to impossible to know in advance what is and isn’t possible. (Also, different people in each organization seem to have different ideas as to what IS possible.)

Nine hours to Atlanta. Each of us had an aisle seat, and that really seemed to make things a lot better, but Susan’s reserves were being diminished rapidly.

Arrival in Atlanta was loosely regulated chaos: we had to go through security — entering the U.S. — and then customs, and then another bank of security (‘entering’ the airport? no idea), and apparently several planes had arrived at once and there were multiple hundreds of people being herded through the cattle lines; they pulled all the wheelchair people out and took them to the front, where they were gradually fed into the mass already at the front … but only two at a time, meaning it took us something like half an hour to get started through that second layer of security. Then Susan’s bag was pulled for a closer look, which only took a few seconds, but those seconds came after four other people’s bags had been gone over one item at a time, making for an additional twenty minutes.

This ridiculous, incompetent, gratuitous mismanagement was balanced by a single airport worker who checked the departure time of our connecting flight, saw that we were in severe danger of having the flight closed before we could reach the gate, and ran pushing Susan’s chair, calling ahead for people to get out of the way (while I followed with our smaller bags, doing my best to keep up, which lasted about half the distance). By the time I finally made it to the gate, he had made arrangements with the agents there, and Susan and I were put onto the plane (me drenched in sweat) only a few minutes before it took off.

The day’s fun wasn’t over, though. When we reached our home airport, we had a series of further surprise. First, our checked luggage wasn’t there, and the tracking system showed it hadn’t made it out of Atlanta. Second … my phone uses Cricket as a carrier, but I found after I got to China that their system — as currently set up — won’t take payments from outside the country. (I paid all my other bills online while I was gone, but Cricket simply had no way around their intractable requirements.) I called the customer service number (that one goes through), but two different agents lost the call while I was talking with them. Susan and I needed phone service before we could arrange a hotel for the night, OR an Uber to take us to that hotel, since it wouldn’t be possible for us to try and get our RV out of storage before the next day.

As it happened, one of the agents had got enough from me, before losing the call, that my phone service came back. That made everything else possible. We got a ride to the hotel, ordered a pizza delivery for our supper, showered before the pizza arrived, and basically vegged until time to make an early bedtime.

Thursday morning, I arranged an Uber to the storage place, found we were paid up till the end of the month — so no rush — and likewise found that both our car and the RV cranked up without any problem. I got some food for tonight (we’d arranged two nights at the hotel, because we didn’t know how long it would take our bags to be returned to us, but they had arrived by breakfast this morning), picked up our stored mail at the post office, and — later in the day — contacted our most recent RV park and were approved for another stint there, starting tomorrow.

So: lots of aggravation along the way, but it all worked out okay in the end.