Tom and I are home in our 80 degree house and so happy to be here. We did arrive with a few less things than we left with. Okay, we arrived empty handed. When we left Omaha yesterday morning, we had a stroller/carseat (my beautiful new Chicco) and two suitcases, and a backpack. We're home safely with our backpack. The rest- well that's a long story...
We had such an easy time in Omaha when the nice lady at Northwest told me that I could "valet check" or gate check my stroller/carseat combo. I thought this would be a good idea because it wouldn't be handled as roughly as other luggage. We wheeled it to our departure gate and were prepared to meet it in our destination city, Chicago. The nice lady said she'd check it through to there since we wouldn't actually need it during our 1 hour layover in Minneapolis. Upon arrival in Minneapolis, we were treated to a ride on the Special People Cart. Since I'm preggo, a nice gentleman set us up with a sweet ride to our next gate.
We arrived in Chicago O'Hare with our 2 suitcases and the backpack, however the stroller/carseat was nowhere to be found! Since it had been gate checked it didn't have the tracking tags on it- just a tag on each that listed its destination. The guy in the lost luggage office at O'Hare was pretty busy and not really a lot of help to us. He was in the middle of dealing with a dog mixup. Apparantly, two dogs with two different destinations (ORD and ORF) were switched and ended up in the wrong cities with the wrong families! This situation made my missing stroller/carseat seem a lot less troubling.
We then had to take a shuttle from O'Hare to Midway airport so we'd be ready for our early morning flight today. We talked with a kind woman in the Midway lost baggage and she helped straighten a few things out and gave us some resources. After arriving at our hotel, Tom proceeded to file the appropriate claims and call all the right people - what a great husband! By 11:45pm, we had received the status that our stroller/carseat was probably gone for good. Nobody had seen it anywhere, and that they'd probably be buying and sending us a brand new one. In the time it takes for the claim to be processed and shipping to occur, they gave us $100 credit to buy a new stroller. The woman on the phone encouraged us to take a midnight taxi to Walmart, buy a stroller, and present the receipt for reimbursement at our 5am check in. I went shopping on Amazon instead. This is what Northwest airlines is buying us for our stroller/carseat troubles:
We woke up at 4am and went to the Midway airport, checked our 2 remaining suitcases and got on our plane. There was a very tight connection in Atlanta (only about 20 minutes because our plane was running late). While we made it to the connecting gate just in time, our luggage did not. Upon arrival in San Pedro Sula, we were down to just our backpack. The people at Delta have located our 2 suitcases and they'll be arriving into La Ceiba tomorrow night. No real biggie, but OF COURSE we'd lose our other 2 bags too!
While the trip home was stressful at times, Tom and I both did a really great job of not getting too worked up. Travel itself is exhausting enough, and I now understand why women in their 8th month of pregnancy don't often travel. The baby is still happily hanging out inside me, and I'm hoping he'll be comfy there for a few more weeks. We're going to fetch our dog in a few minutes and then we'll be so happy to sleep in our own bed tonight. Home Sweet Home!
2 comments:
that all kind of sucks! well, i think there is something to be said about bad luck with traveling these days...i would much rather have been at your baby shower than in Vegas, where i got food poisoning!! and it snowed when we were in southern utah!! I am glad things are going to get worked out though!
don't fret Karine. We don't even have a stroller for a small baby (we have a jogging stroller for when he is bigger) and so far, no problems. A sling works well if you don't get your stroller for a bit...becky
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