Derailed in Frankfurt

Ali- I suppose I know that international travel plans rarely go off without a hitch. Our precisely timed and highly coordinated journey to and entry into Swiss society did not end up proceeding in a Swiss efficient way. First we were about an hour late leaving Baltimore. Our budget airline -Condor air – changed planes but forgot to update seating plans. So imagine heading down the isle to seat 15E only to discover that row 15 doesn’t exist. And cue the chaos! This also impacted pre-flight check, which apparently is highly dependent upon the type of airplane.  Makes sense. Clearly a Cessna prop plane and a Boeing 747 don’t require the same safety checks. But don’t panic! Extra time was built into our excellent planning. Then a heavy storm stranded us on the Tarmac at Frankfurt. Apparently German ground crews can’t get wet (nice bargaining ground crew unions!) because we were told that there was no one….no one…. who would come deal with us until the storm passed.  But don’t panic! We still have time to make our 1pm flight!  At last we disembarked and get on  the over-crowded shuttle bus that will take us to the maze of lines that eventually leads to our next flight to Zurich.  Success! Nothing can stop us now! Two generous souls are waiting for us in Zurich. Alexia is ready with a giant car to handle all our luggage and Ulrike has the key to our new appartment. Alas it’s not to be. As we sit trapped in the plane the crew announces that the entire air traffic control system has crashed and no planes can fly. Is it just me or is this a horrifying thing to learn? Errrr backup system? Errr redundancy? Errrr German precision? So you can see where this is going. After two hours our flight gets cancelled and we are faced with this:

 Long snaking line to Luftansa service desk and a series of depressing failures to rebook with endless texts to Alexia and Ulrike. At last we are waiting for our 9pm flight, having spent our 30 Euro so-sorry-you-are-stuck food voucher on one beer and a couple sandwiches. Ulrike will hopefully meet us at the airport with the key. We’ll take a train to the apartment instead of Alexia’s big car. It’s all good. What could go wrong??