The flight was uneventful and we landed in Atlanta. That's where it got interesting.
You have to clear customs at your first point of entry. This means we needed to go through customs/border control, collect our bags and then put them on the transfer conveyor. No problem.
And since we were sitting at the back of the plane, I thought our bags should already be off-loaded and waiting.
We were on the escalator heading down to customs when I noticed that no one was moving at the bottom. People had exited the escalator and just stopped. We had no place to get off. Seriously. We wouldn't be able to get off the escalator without being thrown into someone. We were about two steps from the bottom and the inevitable crash when someone who had access to the emergency stop button noticed the problem and slammed on the brakes. Let me just say that it's a miracle we weren't thrown into the crowd when that happened.
Just as the escalator stopped someone came through the crowd advising us that travelers with US passports were free to go through. We snaked our way through the crowd and got into line.
These days you need to put your passport into a machine that makes a "ticket" with your picture on it. In Dallas, you come through, print out your "ticket" and go through to the official at the desk.
That's apparently not how it works in Atlanta. Before we could go to the machine we had to show our passports to a woman who then let us pass to the machine. After we printed our "tickets" we had to get in another line. We had to show our passport and our "ticket" to another woman who assigned us to a line where we would show our passport and ticket to the customs official at the desk. So that was a total of three people who had to look at it before we could collect our bags compared to one person in Dallas. Given that TSA is a federal agency, you would think that the procedures would be the same everywhere. The only other place we've come through recently is New York and I just don't remember. It must have been like Dallas, or I probably would have remembered.
We picked up our three bags and took them to the transfer conveyor. They were all of them on a trolley together and we delivered them to the young man who was supposed to put them on the conveyor belt to make their way to our connecting flight to Dallas.
Then we headed to the train which is the primary reason I hate the Atlanta airport. You really do need two or more hours to connect in Atlanta, and we had that much time, so it was no problem.
We were still trying to make sense of what had happened on the escalator. As many years and as many places as we've traveled I have never seen anything like that. Not even in Rome, which can be a bit chaotic. There were also people in the airport with military weapons - something that is common in Europe but not so common in the US. We thought maybe they were on some type of high alert, but no one at the airport seemed to be able to confirm that. So we just chalked it up as interesting.
Then we arrived in Dallas. We'd already been through customs so all we had to do was pick up our bags and pick up our car.
Long story short - the bag that we paid over $100 extra to bring with us was not there. When it became obvious that no more bags were coming out, I went to the baggage claim office and was told that it would arrive the following morning at 8:30 and be delivered to my house by 2:00 pm. I wasn't the only person missing a bag. But I'm grateful that it was on the "home" end of the trip. I was informed that it was Delta's policy to reimburse travelers for bags that had been paid for. I was told to contact them about it, which I did the following day. But of course they told me that they couldn't reimburse me for it because I'd paid Virgin Atlantic for the bag, not Delta. Never mind that Virgin Atlantic delivered the bag safely to Atlanta and then Delta misplaced it. As far as Delta was concerned it had nothing to do with them. But being a squeaky wheel, I did manage to get them to give me a $100 travel voucher - even though the idea of traveling with Delta doesn't really inspire me. But back to the sort of interesting day.
We went outside to wait for the Park and Fly shuttle. He just flew by. Didn't stop, didn't even slow down. I thought maybe we were at the wrong place so I phoned them. They told me where I needed to be. "That's where I am! Your guy just blew through here without even slowing down!) She phoned him and told him to come back to get us.
And of course, we had no idea what we'd done with the parking ticket. We told her we'd come in on the 30th of April and thankfully she didn't question that. (It was roughly three weeks.) I never did figure out what we'd done with that. (Dry cleaning tickets disappear in much the same way.)
And the interesting part of the day ended there. We were home. Sort of. But most of our stuff was packed up and sitting in storage but the house hadn't sold yet. And now we were going to have to figure out what to do next.
Interesting. Maybe not. While proof reading this post, I've decided that there really wasn't much interesting about it. The incident at the Atlanta airport was very curious, but probably not interesting. But I'm too tired to rewrite it.
These days you need to put your passport into a machine that makes a "ticket" with your picture on it. In Dallas, you come through, print out your "ticket" and go through to the official at the desk.
That's apparently not how it works in Atlanta. Before we could go to the machine we had to show our passports to a woman who then let us pass to the machine. After we printed our "tickets" we had to get in another line. We had to show our passport and our "ticket" to another woman who assigned us to a line where we would show our passport and ticket to the customs official at the desk. So that was a total of three people who had to look at it before we could collect our bags compared to one person in Dallas. Given that TSA is a federal agency, you would think that the procedures would be the same everywhere. The only other place we've come through recently is New York and I just don't remember. It must have been like Dallas, or I probably would have remembered.
We picked up our three bags and took them to the transfer conveyor. They were all of them on a trolley together and we delivered them to the young man who was supposed to put them on the conveyor belt to make their way to our connecting flight to Dallas.
Then we headed to the train which is the primary reason I hate the Atlanta airport. You really do need two or more hours to connect in Atlanta, and we had that much time, so it was no problem.
We were still trying to make sense of what had happened on the escalator. As many years and as many places as we've traveled I have never seen anything like that. Not even in Rome, which can be a bit chaotic. There were also people in the airport with military weapons - something that is common in Europe but not so common in the US. We thought maybe they were on some type of high alert, but no one at the airport seemed to be able to confirm that. So we just chalked it up as interesting.
Then we arrived in Dallas. We'd already been through customs so all we had to do was pick up our bags and pick up our car.
Long story short - the bag that we paid over $100 extra to bring with us was not there. When it became obvious that no more bags were coming out, I went to the baggage claim office and was told that it would arrive the following morning at 8:30 and be delivered to my house by 2:00 pm. I wasn't the only person missing a bag. But I'm grateful that it was on the "home" end of the trip. I was informed that it was Delta's policy to reimburse travelers for bags that had been paid for. I was told to contact them about it, which I did the following day. But of course they told me that they couldn't reimburse me for it because I'd paid Virgin Atlantic for the bag, not Delta. Never mind that Virgin Atlantic delivered the bag safely to Atlanta and then Delta misplaced it. As far as Delta was concerned it had nothing to do with them. But being a squeaky wheel, I did manage to get them to give me a $100 travel voucher - even though the idea of traveling with Delta doesn't really inspire me. But back to the sort of interesting day.
We went outside to wait for the Park and Fly shuttle. He just flew by. Didn't stop, didn't even slow down. I thought maybe we were at the wrong place so I phoned them. They told me where I needed to be. "That's where I am! Your guy just blew through here without even slowing down!) She phoned him and told him to come back to get us.
And of course, we had no idea what we'd done with the parking ticket. We told her we'd come in on the 30th of April and thankfully she didn't question that. (It was roughly three weeks.) I never did figure out what we'd done with that. (Dry cleaning tickets disappear in much the same way.)
And the interesting part of the day ended there. We were home. Sort of. But most of our stuff was packed up and sitting in storage but the house hadn't sold yet. And now we were going to have to figure out what to do next.
Interesting. Maybe not. While proof reading this post, I've decided that there really wasn't much interesting about it. The incident at the Atlanta airport was very curious, but probably not interesting. But I'm too tired to rewrite it.
No comments:
Post a Comment