Unexpectedly, Frankfurt.

Oh the joys of traveling! It’s been a looooooong 24 hours.

Essentially due to a scheduling mix up, our first flight to Geneva didn’t happen. So we were rebooked on a flight that had a connecting flight out of Frankfurt. Here is where the fun begins. After learning of this booking we realized our connection was 20 minutes from touch down to take off. Frankfurt is also a HUGE airport and if you’re connecting flight is in different gates, or heaven forbid, a different terminal – ha! Good luck!

We brought this up right away to the gate personnel boarding us from Iceland to Germany. They said the plane knew of our tight connection and would wait. Whew, that’s was good news. Also the last we had for the remainder of the day.

Shortly before boarding was to commence, they changed departure time to delayed by 25 minutes. Yikes, there went our entire window for our connection. Then the captain himself came out and made an announcement that due to weather in Germany, our flight was grounded and would now depart in 2 hours.

Zaq and I, having just flown in this same morning to Iceland, had not had true sleep in 36 hours. You can imagine we were a little put out, but it was out of our control.

(Landing in Frankfurt, Germany)

Finally arriving in Frankfurt at 10pm, we’d learned our connecting flight had to take off without us, due to our long delay. We also found out that there was no bad weather. Our flight was delayed because there was an issue with a connecting flight for 30 people going to Shang Hai and rather than compensate them they delayed our flight; rescheduled everyone and only had to compensate the handful of us unlucky few that had to wait to leave until the next morning.

Once again we were rebooked to the next available flight to Geneva, which would be at 7:00am the following day. By the time the airlines were able to help us get our new boarding passes, food vouchers and accommodations for the night, it was 11:30pm.

We were told the hotel was about a 20 min drive away. We did a pros and cons assessment of which would provide us more rest and less stress: leaving the airport to sleep in a real bed for two hours and then having to go through security in the morning, or just crashing in the airport terminal. We deduced that we were looking at another hours worth of travel with the taxi and getting checked into the hotel. Which would give us maybe 4 hours to be at the hotel before we had to come right back. We opted to stay put and get as much shut eye we could in the Frankfurt terminal.

After a quick poor mans bath in the lavatories, we found a corner and sprawled out. I woke up almost every hour worried we’d slept through our flight or worried something would happen to my bag while I slept. Sleeping in public is pretty uncomfortable as it turns out.

(I woke up like this.)

Zaq and I both roused around 5:00am and sat up; looked at each other for a long time. Silent understanding passing between us. Then we both smiled, laughed, and Zaq summed up our last 24 hours with “Well, that was interesting.”

Auf Wiedershen! Hopefully in Switzerland.

~A&Z