Ok, so everyone knows that Thomas has been asking to go to England to see various old people and places for quite some time. He finally became free after the last of his recitals and FIM internship library work at the end of last week. So the plan was that he would leave yesterday and come back mid July. When I made the reservations, flights from Detroit to London were ungodly expensive, and they were all terrible flights--2 or 3 layovers, 18 to 27 hour total flight times...ridiculous for anyone, but simply unacceptable for a legal minor to manage with no real financial security (such as credit cards) to cover emergencies. Finally I had a brain wave and checked out flights out of Toronto to Manchester and hit gold: Lufthansa had a non-stop flight (6 hours!) for about $600 round trip, about 1/4 what the Detroit/London flights cost. So, it's a 4 hour drive from Flint to Toronto, but not stressful (if the border crossing goes well) and (apparently) navigating Toronto airport is easy. So, off we set yesterday afternoon, Thomas and I, happy and carefree. I had given us MANY more hours because I imagined a terrible border crossing (it was long, an hour, but I've heard of worse)and also I expected Thomas to want to stop and eat some place. He didn't, he insisted he just wanted to get to the airport, get to the gate, and think about food then. So, we arrived, still happy and excited. When we got inside, we were ushered to the appropriate Air Canada check in (though a Lufthansa flight, it was being "operated by" Air Canada). So far, so good. When we got to the desk (45 minutes later--an unbelievably number of extremely large families with an even more unbelievable number of suitcases were traveling then), we were feeling fine. Then, as the ticket agent took, stared, and stared again, at Thomas passport and his computer monitor, I started to get uneasy. Finally he tells us that the name on the passport doesn't match the name on the ticket reservation. Given that Thomas is still at large, I will leave details of the error offline until I see him safely in U.S. soil on July 13th. For now, let's just say, we had a problem. The ticket agent refused to change the reservation name to match the passport name and called his manager over. First, she denied there was such a flight from Toronto to Manchester. She insisted that we were flying into London, and that we had the wrong airline. I pointed out that I had seen the flight listed on the airport monitors, where it said we should get to gate E80---which is why were were in concourse E, trying to get to gate 80. She clearly thought I was insane, belligerent and flat out wrong. Finally, she disappeared for about 10 minutes, came back and said, "It seems this is the first day for this new flight." Rather than apologize, she became angrier. (She said, "I understand ma'am." a lot, but I don't think she really did. Ultimately, she refused to authorize the change and told me to call the company that issued the ticket and they would do that--and make it snappy because if I didn't get it done within the next 55 minutes, they wouldn't be permitted to issue a boarding pass. As a conciliatory bone, she did say that once we got it straightened out, we could come back, notify a free standing agent and they would take care of us right away so we could avoid the line. So how the f**k do we do that?
Problem 1: My phone (and Thomas's) was dead (because "international" phone coverage does not extend to Canada or Mexico, I now know) so I couldn't call anyone. She gave me a copy of phone cards from a fistful she had in her apron pocket (does this sort of thing happen daily?) and pointed me to a phone box.
Problem 2: No one would admit they sold the ticket. Lufthansa claimed they didn't because, though a Lufthansa airplane, it was being "operated by" Air Canada. Air Canada said they didn't sell the ticket, but United Airlines did. I will spare everyone the details of the useless phone cards which didn't work, the nerve-wracking minutes dripping by, spent listening to muzak designed in Hell, and finally getting a customer agent who claimed "there was nothing she could do." But, to be helpful, she did suggest that I go back to the person at the ticket counter as they are perfectly free to change the name on the ticket reservation. Hah! I laughed, hollowly. In the end, the only thing I could do was cancel the existing ticket, get a $300 refund and buy a completely new ticket (exactly the same flights, there and back) for MANY times the original price. Teeth gritted, jaws clenched, I wrote down the purchase confirmation number and we headed back to the free standing agents (there were 3 of them milling around, uselessly) so they could shepherd us to the front of the line. No dice. They informed me that we were to talk with them so that they could tell us to go to the
end of the line. "You have plenty of time," they assured me, with all the enthusiasm and sincerity of a clockwatcher whose shift is about to end. So we went to the end of the line again, both too miserable to talk. When we get up there, the new ticket had entered the system, so that problem solved, but by that point time was desperate: Thomas had to leg it through security, get to the gate and check in again...all within 30 minutes or the plane door would be locked with him on the outside. So, there I left him, crying (me, not him) with no idea if he got to the plane in time and no way to find out because both of us had dead phones. My phone didn't come alive again until, literally, I reached the halfway point on the bridge between Canada and the U.S..
I didn't get much sleep last night. Simon called to check up on him this morning and, happily, he was with Granny and Peter, and he was very happy indeed. Here's proof: Granny took this picture as Thomas emerged after customs and such:
Obviously Thomas is so happy to be there, to be alive and to be with humans he knows, he is moving too fast for the camera to catch him.
And, this was the flight I was NOT worried about, as it had no layovers. Coming home, he has a 3 hour layover in Washington D.C. What nightmares will arise then? I can't take the stress.
