Prik Ki Nu

Today is the big day for our trip and it’s already beyond everyday vacation status. It’s an adventure…

Checklist:

2. House clean and tidy –> check
3. Dogs washed –> check
4. Bags packed, repacked, weighed, packed again –> check
5. Tickets, passports and hotel info –> check
6. Cab ordered for 8:30am –> check
7. Flight departure time and schedule –> check

All good to go?

Well it all went really well until we arrived at the UA biz lounge (red carpet club) to find our flight to Chicago was delayed by 1h45. Not too bad but a flaming disaster considering we have a 90 minute connection to pickup the flights to Paris. Argh! Now you might be asking why I just found this out at the airport? Surely the savvy travel would have checked all this before leaving home… Remember the checklist #6? Well, it seems our dependence on web sites has gone a little too far - the info was way out of date. It didn’t mention that the Chicago area had been experiencing thunderstorms for the past two days and had backed up flights all throughout the system… go figure.

Rule #1 when traveling internationally:

Planning for a longer layover (around 3 hours), is a good thing. While it will add a few hours onto your travel time, it’s a way of ensuring you get where you want when you expect to. A little bit of contingency planning goes a long way…

The original plan was to leave Seattle (SEA), change planes in Chicago (ORD), arrive in Paris (CDG), take a series of subway connections to the train station, catch the high-speed to Caen, then have a car from the B&B pick us up and make the hour or so drive to Rock-N-Roll Adventures. All this is prepaid and non-refundable.

After a series of conversations with the booking agents in Seattle, we had the choice of:

2. Chance the flight to Chicago. The plane heading to Paris was also delayed and there was a possibility that they would not be able to turn it around in time.
3. Go home (pay the taxi again…both ways). Then begin flying Saturday morning SEA ->ORD -> IAD (Dulles) -> CDG -> … points beyond. Why not fly directly SEA -> IAD? 2 days of “weather” and 1000’s of stranded travelers adds up to lots of very full flights.

We flew to Chicago and hoped for the best. It was close but no cigar this time. We missed the connection by over an hour

Tomorrow we have an 8am flight from Chicago -> Dulles -> Paris. We chose the early flight to ensure no missed connections. If everything goes to plan, we’ll have four hours to head into Washington and checkout the Vietnam wall, Korean memorial, etc before picking up the evening flight into Paris. Phew, what a day…

Nige & Lynn

by Nigel

This entry was posted on Friday, May 12th, 2006 at 9:45 am and is filed under World Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.