NOT. THERE. YET.
Wow, what a day it was yesterday. We started off with our flight out of San Diego taking off two hours late because of the weather in San Francisco. I’m not sure what that was about. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t snowing there.
Well, because our first flight was so late arriving in San Fran, we watched our connecting flight to Frankfurt take off while we were landing. Even though there was another flight twenty minutes after we arrived and we made it to the gate in time, United & Lufthansa couldn’t get their heads together in time to get us on.
That forced us to improvise and change our flights to go through London. After working on that for an hour or so, we were put on standby for the London flight. When the time to board came, we were overjoyed that we all got a seat. We were home-free…or so we thought!
It turned out the plane that was working just fine when it landed now couldn’t turn the overhead cabin lights on and off. Unfortunately that’s enough to keep the plane from taking off. They worked on it for two-and-a-half hours before taking us off so we could board another plane. Then, twenty minutes after getting off the plane, United told us the problem had been fixed and they were going to re-board us onto the original plane. Alas, that was a tease as after another twenty minutes they informed us we would be boarding a different plane. There was wide-spread laughter after that announcement.
We weren’t too worried at this point because our connecting flight in London was scheduled almost five hours after we were supposed to land. We thought the buffer was enough. We were wrong.
After finally boarding the new aircraft, we sat at the gate for twenty minutes only to be informed that our crew could not continue with us because the duration of the flight would force them to work more than 14 hours. That meant we would be staying in San Fran for another hour or so (it turned out to be an hour and a half) while United put together a replacement crew.
Now time was becoming a concern, but we still all thought we’d be alright and make it into Croatia by 10pm Saturday night. Once the crew got on, closed the doors and we left the terminal a few passengers began to applaud. Some of us held back our applause, however, until we actually got off the ground. Appropriately so, it turned out. Before even lining up to take off, the pilot came on the intercom to inform us that our new aircraft had a defective valve and we were going back to the gate for the ground crew to repair it.
Needless to say, JoAnn, Marcus, Jenna, and I were past frustrated. At this point, punch-drunk would be an accurate description of how we felt.
United kept us on the plane for another hour-and-a-half or so before finally giving up. The booked us on flights for the next day, and gave us hotel vouchers. Of course that process took a heck of a lot longer to happen than it did to type it. It was 3:30am by the time we finally hit the sheets at the Airport Hyatt hotel.
So here we are, twenty-four hours later, still in the U.S. God is doing something in all this, but we aren’t sure what it is yet. One thing we know: We don’t have to have all the facts before we trust God to do what God does. It’s a new morning, we start fresh, and God will get the victory!
