What a trip

My flight from Munich to Madrid was supposed to leave at 7:05PM on the 16^th Dec. On the morning of that day, I received an automated call from Chile telling me that my LAN flight from Madrid to Guayaquil would have a new departure time “at 30AM". Although I am not American or English, I was pretty sure that this time format didn’t exist. So, I checked on the website. It told me that my flight was 13 hours late (so actually it was canceled) and thus I would have to spend a night in Madrid and one night in Guayaquil. But since I have experienced a lot of strange things when traveling, I decided to pretend as if all is great and head to the airport at the planned time and take it from there.

Check in isn’t easy if you have 5 suitcases totaling 110kg. I was prepared to pay 200 EUR for the additional luggage, since that was what the LAN website stated. Well, I didn’t take into account that my first leg of the trip was on Iberia and thus had to pay by their scheme. To make a (actually much) longer story short, I paid 270 EUR but because of two mistakes of the Iberia Ticketing lady, I didn’t have to pay 360 EUR and my luggage was paid until Cuenca (which usually is not the case).  So, check in was done after just 1.5 hours lol.

Because of the snow in Northern Germany, we had a delay of a good hour. No big deal given the fact that I had a planned layover in Madrid of 2.5 hours plus the unsecure situation with the flight itself. Even in Munich, no-one could tell me when it would leave. Anyway…

The long-distance flight actually left at about 3AM although the plane was there all the time between the initial departure time. LAN couldn’t organize a crew on time – which funny enough they knew 20 hours before that. The flight was very full. No space in Business class. I was tempted to buy an upgrade as I have quite a bad cold. But hey, I had a very nice Ecuadorian student who studies in Bonn next to me and I am sure that this will not be the last contact that we had. He also helped me a bit through customs. Although I really didn’t smuggle anything, I felt a bit on the spot when I had to open the one suitcase that had my 2 NAS and a 2TB hard drive plus some other nice stuff in it. In the end, all was cool though. No payments required.

Since MAD-GYE was delayed, I was sure I missed my connection to Cuenca. But no. The plane was still there. After just 30 minutes, I could board and thought that this would be it. Again, 2 hours late but that was ok. I fell asleep during taxi. When I woke up, we were parking at a gate. I looked out of my window and immediately realized, that this was not right. We didn’t lift off…. And even had to leave the plane again. Now, about 3 hours later, I sneaked into the VIP lounge and even got hold of the WLAN password to write this blog :)

The flight is now due in about half an hour – 5.5 hours after the original departure time (which, as I mentioned I would not have made anyway). So, in South American terms, I guess I should be quite happy. Could be much worse…

I’ll keep you posted.