This is the story of Delta and KLM. Last year we were on American Airlines, who still owe us money, and who will never figure into a story I tell ever again. But between that, and Delta and KLM, we are wondering if we should fly in March ever again.
First, Delta.
When our Delta flight was late departing JFK for Amsterdam, we knew we would be in trouble catching our connection to Barcelona. We were correct. The Yankee spent much of the night talking to Delta on the phone, while we were still in New York, and through their app, while we were in the air.
Delta was happy to send us to Zurich later today, and then to Barcelona late on Friday.
The purpose of our trip to Barcelona was for a conference, and it took place in the City of Counts on Friday and Saturday. Going to Zurich would mean losing the best part of the conference. It’s her favorite conference, so we were getting inventive on ways to get there on time, or close to it. There are four other international airports in Spain. Could we get into one of those? Train over to the city by the sea? Should we rent a car in Amsterdam, after an overnight flight where we had about two hours of sleep, and try driving 14 hours into Spain?
Delta, like arguing with a family member who can’t be proven wrong, couldn’t see the problem of sending us to Zurich. That was just their solution, for some reason. (Delta customer service has taken a hit, it seems.) We went to Zurich last year, thanks, and that’s two countries removed from where we are supposed to be.
Because of this intractability, we were down to figuring this out in Amsterdam, with Delta’s airline partners.
Which brings us to KLM.
After trekking through Amsterdam’s enormous airport, going through the longest, slowest passport control line outside of the United States and being told to go to different wrong places for different wrong desks, you begin to wonder how anyone ever arrives on a plane in the correct place in a timely fashion, let alone how their luggage gets there, too.
At the third desk, we have finally arrived at the right spot, where a laconic KLM agent patiently and emphatically explained that, for us, it was Zurich or bust. Also, we must go to that gate now to make the flight.
Dejected, we headed that way. We were trying to reconcile ourselves to the idea of missing the bulk of the conference when we learned that we missed the flight to Zurich, too.
Back to that last KLM desk. The taciturn woman was helping someone else. Her more bubbly colleague drew the short straw with us. There were no flights, this woman said, into Barcelona through Sunday. There goes the whole conference.
What to do? Go home? Figure out some way to move on to the vacation leg of this trip? It was a mildly grim moment.
Then another KLM agent comes to the desk area. This new man and the bubbly woman chat back and forth in Dutch. And he finds that two people have canceled their trips to Barcelona that evening. While we were just standing there, wondering what to do.
From having absolutely no options to suddenly having seats, we were on our way. Hoof it over to this gate, and we actually have time to do that.
We thank her and her male colleague. To him, it’s just another task, and we’re obviously making him a little uncomfortable. So I turn back to the bubbly one, make the big eye contact and tell her she has been the best part of our day. We left for the gate right then. We’d wait there a few hours, removing all opportunity for stupid errors.
And so we strolled down to gate D85. Which is also, oddly, D55.
At this point we’re 22 hours into our trip, on two hours of sleep, and in a week that hasn’t seen an awful lot of sleep anyway. I sat beneath that monitor, took a photo of that monitor, and studied them both carefully, for a long, long time.
Are we in the right place?
Is this the right time?
Where is the plane?
Or even the gate crew?
Or the other passengers?
Finally, they all showed up. The passengers, the gate agents, the plane. We boarded, not sitting together, but happy to be in two middle seats, and going to the correct country, to say nothing of the correct city. We were finally on a flight to Barcelona.
At the Barcelona airport a guy appointed himself our taxi man. I’d just seen a dog do the squat of shame inside the airport. Then and there I said to myself, we are 27 hours or so into this trip and I will take a cab to anywhere, so long as it meant there was a hotel, and the end of this journey, on the other end.
I’d make Lewis and Clark proud, no doubt.
Or, on the one hand, we traveled a considerable distance, from the middle of the new world to one of the western parts of the old world, in just over a day. On the other hand, it took 27 hours to do so.
The taxi driver, who quickly sussed out that we were American and dutifully turned his radio over to the Barcelona station playing American classics and the hits of mañana, did not have any paper for a receipt in his hand-sized money device. I took a picture of his screen. That’s just going to have to do for reimbursement purposes.
We checked into the hotel at 9:30, dog tired, some eight hours later than scheduled, but ready for a shower, a meal and sleep.
Good news! The hotel restaurant stays open until 10:30. There’s enough time for us to get to our room, freshen up, and get a bite to eat.
The hotel restaurant is good! I had an Iberian pork plate. The Yankee ordered a salad. The salad was fresh. Very fresh. One of the little critters that had made the lettuce it’s home, perhaps as recently as yesterday, was still hanging out there.
Maybe that’s a Spanish thing? Of all the things you look up before traveling abroad, how a nation treats their salads is way down the list. (But it won’t be for the next trip, wherever that is.) The server stopped by to check on us. We show him the critter. He picks up the little saucer and the little critter and speed walked to the kitchen.
We never saw him again.
Another server takes over, apologizing profusely, offering us a dessert on him. We take him up on a scoop of ice cream. He brought us la cuenta, and it’s a blank piece of receipt paper. Flip it over, nothing there either.
Maybe, I said wearily, this is a Spanish thing? The server takes the receipt. Makes a big theatrical gesture of flipping it over and over, holding it to the light.
“Do you see anything on it?” he said, in his quite good English.
No, we did not.
“Then it must be free.”
So they picked up the entire bill. And, because of a translation issue, we’d ordered more than we intended anyway.
This second server said the first guy was so embarrassed he couldn’t bear to come out to face us. So we spent a good amount of time apologizing to one another. Please make sure he understands we aren’t upset, and we know it isn’t his fault. And the second server continually apologizing and humanizing himself and his coworkers. It was charming in a multi-lingual/mostly-English, please-let-me-go-upstairs-and-to-sleep way.
Tomorrow, somehow, we go to the conference that we almost missed.
