2 June 2007

We have made it home…..not without a few aggravations, but home nonetheless.

The disembarkation from the Star Princess was smooth and well organized from our perspective. We had a 10:15am flight out of Copenhagen and we were using Princess Air airline arrangements and Princess airport transfers. Our scheduled disembarkation time was 6:15am and our color code was called around 6:25am. Because we had Princess Air and Princess airport transfers we DID NOT have to claim our bags at the cruise terminal, haul them to the airport and go through customs…..the bags were sent directly to the airport where there was a separate remote facility to claim the bags and re-check them onto the airlines and get boarding passes.  Then we took a shuttle bus from the remote facility to the main terminal. The main terminal was very crowded and confused, but we just had to go straight to security and then to our gate….(more on that in a minute)….we avoided the huge lines at the airline baggage/ticket counters. It was very nice. I would like to complement Princess on having organized a very efficient mechanism for disembarkation…..and I hope they can fan-out this methodology to other ports. So, Princess gets lots of points in my book for disembarkation.

…..now we have cleared security at the Copenhagen airport and just have to go to our gate. The only problem is that the gate for our flight is not listed. This is not a problem, we have plenty of time. I stroll through the duty-free shops (which are large, clean, numerous and expensive) and contemplate how I can best spend my last 200 Danish Kroner. But, prices being what they are I settle on a bottle of water and a package of hard candy to help me pass the time. I check for the gate assignment, which is still not available, then make another circuit of the terminal, read for a bit and check the gate assignment again….and again, nothing. Some of the flights are not showing gate assignments until AFTER the scheduled boarding times……I’m wondering if this is part of the Danish airport security process….you can see someone thinking: “if we just keep the gate assignments secret then the terrorists won’t know how to get on our flights”.  Well, that is true, but then neither will your passengers.  Finally, with just minutes to spare before the scheduled boarding, our gate assignment is made and we dash for the gate area…….only to find a line of about 200 people out into the hallway. It seems that the second part of Danish airport security strategy is to close and lock the waiting area at the gate, thus insuring that passengers must stand in long lines cluttering the hall and blocking other passengers from getting to their gates instead of lounging comfortably in the chairs sitting empty on the other side of the locked partition. And so we stand until boarding the airplane.  (Note to the Copenhagen Airport Authority: Remember that “I Heart Copenhagen” beer ad? …got the image?  That’s what I’m doing to you now….upraised middle finger, naked butt and all….except I’m not quite as “artful” as the poster. )

Our flight from Copenhagen to Frankfurt is late….very late, but there are a lot of cruisers on the flight and all of them have connecting flights and so our Frankfurt to Toronto flight is held for us. I don’t know if this is just the airline’s normal policy or if this is Princess putting some pressure on the airline, but the flight is held until all the Princess people make the connection.

In Toronto we have to claim our luggage and clear U.S. customs and re-check our bags again…..it seems like a strange arrangement and a bit of a hassle, but in fact, it works fairly smoothly……almost. We are missing a bag. Not a problem, we have plenty of time, we’ll wait. We wait for an hour. Still no bag. We contact the airline baggage people. They will check….We wait…..no answer. Two hours. We wait. Finally, we are told to go through customs and get to our next flight and file a lost bag report. We go stand in the long customs line.   As we get within a few people of the customs desk the airline baggage lady says that they’ve found some bags and they’ll be right up. We exit the customs line and go wait. No bags. We are told “the bags are on the way….just wait another 15 minutes”. We wait. No bags. After another 30 minutes I go stand in the baggage information line again. I’m told “sorry, no bags”.  So, it’s back into the customs line. Once we arrive at customs, the inspector has no interest in us other than to enquire about how we liked the cruise. We are through and racing for our departure gate……a gate that we are supposed to have had a leisurely 3 hours to find, but all 3 hours have been consumed by standing around in the baggage area waiting on the phantom bag……we arrive at the gate only to find it deserted. It seems that sometime during the nearly 3 hours since we picked up our boarding pass while we were waiting on the bag, the gate assignment has been changed and is in another area of the terminal…….we begin the ‘airport dash’ again.

…..luckily for us, this flight is delayed too; so we do make it to the gate before boarding.

The flight from Toronto to Dallas is relatively uneventful……..well, I think it was uneventful, I dosed and half-watched a movie until I was shaken awake by the thump of the airplane wheels hitting the tarmac at DFW.  

At DFW I finally found the airline baggage representative and filed a ‘missing bag’ report. She took the information and said they would call with information on the bag when it was located, but that if I didn’t hear from them I should wait until after 1:00pm the following day to call for an update on the bag.  Since I had climbed out of bed on the Star Princess that morning 26 hours had passed as we traveled back home. It was a long day.

Today, only partly rested, and still feeling the motion of the ship under my feet,  I dutifully waited until after 1:00pm, and then, since I had not received a call from the airline, I called their office to get an update. I received a recording stating that their offices close at…….can you guess……1:00pm.  So, yes, with a straight face the airline representatives tell you to call for information, but to only call after the offices are closed……..I think I read the same thing in “Catch-22” when I was still in high school.

….but we are home.

I will try to put together a few parting thoughts on the trip in a few days and post them to finish out this section of the website. But for now, my body still thinks it is in Copenhagen and that its time for bed….and I must obey.