Wilkommen in der Schweiz! (Teil 1/Part 1)
I am sitting on my bed in our temporary flat on Wasserwerkstrasse writing this post and listening to the Kirchenglocken (church bells) chiming outside our open windows. Warning: this post will be longer than it should because we got stuck overnight in Washington, DC. I think we knew it was a bad omen when there was a monsoon on our drive to the Austin airport, and a lot of the roads around the airport were flash flooding. Check-in and wading through our mound of documents went smoothly, probably because we were business class and had premier access. Plus, we had gotten 2 covid tests - one on June 1 and one on June 2 - to cover all of our bases. And we’re both fully vacciniated.
When we boarded our first flight, the pilot explained on the intercom that there was a wicked weather system over the entire southeast that he would have to fly around. So our trip from Austin to Washington, DC took us up to Chicago, over Ohio, and on to DC. We left 30 min late and took an extra hour due to our crazy route. Basically everyone on the plane missed their connecting flight, including us. That didn’t stop us from being the first people off the plane and trying to sprint from gate C20something down to gate C7 to see if they had held the plane for us. In short, nope, they didn’t. Then we had to get into the Customer Service line.
We were about 4th or 5th in line, however United was totally unprepared for the number of customers who were requiring service. One of the agents kept telling everybody to check their United app for their re-booking info, but somehow no one had received anything. I knew that we had a possible “Karen” situation on our hands when the woman waiting next to be helped got into it with the agent. Agent: “Check your app for your rescheduled flight!” Karen: “How about we just get some service instead?!” (with a Jersey accent and a ton of attitude). When she finally got called up to the desk for her turn, her agent happened to be that same lady. We went from level 1 to level 5 Karen in about 2 minutes. “I want to speak to a manager!” “You WILL be booking me a hotel room! I am here ALONE and I am NOT sleeping in this airport!” They went back and forth for quite a while, until Karen finally just sat down beside the desk and waited for a manager or something. The whole thing was ridiculous, because United wasn’t required to offer hotel rooms for a delay/missed connection due to weather. Every single person who went up to the desk spent 10-15 minutes arguing that same point.
It had to be 45 minutes later, we finally got our chance to speak to an agent. “Oh you shouldn’t have waited in that line - you’re business class!” Yeah, now you tell me. We were offered a room, but we quickly decided that we didn’t want to stay at a hotel near the airport. We’d rather go in to the city, get our own room, do some sightseeing, and eat good food. We got our boarding passes, and it took us 10-15 more minutes to convince the agent that we didn’t want food vouchers or any other stuff that they were offering. Their machine wouldn’t print, by this time there were at least 50 people in the Customer Service line, and they had served about 5 of us. Finally we pretty much walked away from the agent in order to go catch a Lyft into the city and get out of everyone’s way.
While we were on the train from the terminal to ground transportation, something curious caught my eye. There was a young guy standing by me who I saw was wearing a handcuff bracelet. His hands weren’t connected in front or back like you usually see when someone is cuffed. He was wearing a windbreaker and the cuffs were attached to each pocket. It was like a handcuff disguise jacket. He had at least 2 guys escorting him who were wearing Army National Guard backpacks. Very curious. They exited at ground transportation right in front of us, so I kept my eye on them. Then I had to sneak a pic of them from afar. I tried to watch and see what kind of transport picked them up, but I got distracted. Now I’ll never know the rest of that story.
Ok, I think I’ll wrap it up here. Next part should have more photos than text!