Fun with planes

On occasion, flying isn't the most fun experience one can have. (I'll just note here that I still love flying when everything goes well.) Unfortunately, Stace and the kids are having one of those less-than-fun experiences right now.

They showed up at the Zurich airport for their 9:50 a.m. flight to Atlanta yesterday. They were told that a mechanical problem would delay the flight until 10:50. Then, they were told that a part had to be flown in from London and that the flight would take off at 3:30. This meant that they would miss their connecting flight from Atlanta. The airline went ahead and booked them on a routing that would take them from Zurich to JFK, from JFK to Atlanta, have them spend the night in Atlanta, and then fly to Salt Lake the next day. I called the airline and politely told them that was stupid. (I'm platinum on Delta, so Delta is somewhat accommodating when I call.) We got them back on the flight from Zurich to Atlanta and then on a later flight from Atlanta to Salt Lake the same day.

Well, the plane with the part from London had to turn back. This pushed the departure time from Zurich to 5:30. There was still a slight chance that they could make the last connecting flight out of Atlanta, so we scheduled them on that flight.

So, to pause for a recap, by this time, after waking up early to leave the house at 6:30, Stace and the kids had spent nine hours at the Zurich airport and were still facing about fifteen hours on planes to get home. There was at least a chance that they could make it to Salt Lake if everything went well.

Of course, everything didn't go well. For some reason, the plane left the gate in Zurich but then sat on the runway for about an hour and a half. This meant that they had no chance to make the last connecting flight in Atlanta. I put them on a 10:00 flight out of Atlanta the next day and went to bed while they flew for ten and a half hours.

They finally did land in Atlanta, but it took a while to get things worked out, get through customs, get to the hotel shuttle, and such. I last talked with Stace at 7:30 this morning. She was on the shuttle to the hotel. This was 25 hours after we'd left the house yesterday morning. (Side note: conversations get interesting when you span time zones and don't go to bed. Stace kept talking about all of the adventures they'd had "this morning" and "today," but from my perspective, that had all happened yesterday.)

Anyway, they were so beat by the time they were heading to the hotel that we changed them to a later flight. Stace was worried about being able to wake the kids once they got to sleep. They're now scheduled to leave Atlanta at 2:00 p.m., arriving in Salt Lake at 4:00. The bottom line is that, assuming they make it to Salt Lake as scheduled, it will have taken them about 44 hours from the time they left our house in Switzerland until the time they arrive at her parents' house in Provo. Sounds fun, doesn't it?