…than the bullshit begins.
In fact, it had begun before we even touched down in Charlotte. Our flight from Cancún was carrying no I-94W forms on board, one of which I need to fill in before I can re-enter the US. This is the first international flight to the US that I’ve ever been on that didn’t carry a pile of such forms.
With only a 70 minute layover in Charlotte, I did not need to be wasting time filling in my forms on arrival, when I could have done so on the plane. US immigration is notoriously slow and must be undergone (yes, undergone is the right word here) at one’s point of entry, not one’s final destination.
Well, Charlotte turned out to have the slowest immigration processing of any American airport I’ve ever entered the country through. I timed the queues: they were processing individuals at the rate of slower than one person every five minutes. Simple arithmetic demonstrated that, with the number of other poor unfortunates in front of us, it was going to be very tight getting onto our next flight.
We finally got through immigration after being sent to another queue, where a couple of gracious passengers allowed us to go ahead of them when they overheard us talking about missing our connection. There were twenty minutes to go until our flight left. Sounds like plenty, right? Wrong.
You see, they have this other great system here, whereby you also need to reclaim your baggage from the conveyor belt at your point of entry. Once you’ve done that, you carry it about 200 m to another conveyor belt, upon which you place it back into the system. Busy work for psychiatric patients, I call it. How did anyone dream this up? Why can’t this be automated?
But it gets better, of course. Because you’ve now had access to your checked-in bags, you’re now tainted. This means that you now have to go back through security (because you could have taken something out of your checked-in luggage that is not allowed in the cabin on your next flight), which in our case means not just removing laptops from bags, emptying fluid from bottles, removing belts, shoes and whatnot, but also having the car-seat examined, the buggy inspected, and last but not least, Sarah subjected to another body check on account of her refusal to walk through the x-ray machine as a pregnant woman. Of course, all of this had already been done once earlier that day in Cancún.
As if that’s not bad enough, before we could even go through security, we had to queue for the pleasure. The queue for our concourse (C) was too long — we didn’t stand a chance — so we had to scurry down to concourse B, go through security there, then scurry back to C.
It never rains, but it pours, so our gate, C19, was the very last one at the back of the terminal. We hurried as fast as we could with our car-seat, buggy, camera, laptop and other hand-baggage — not to forget Eloïse, who was a trooper and sat cooperatively in her car-seat the entire time as we raced it down the concourse — down to gate C19, where we just managed to make it onto the plane as the door was closed behind us.
Even then, the fun wasn’t over. We were located in the row behind the emergency exit row and a child’s seat is not allowed there, so after sitting down and fastening first the car-seat and then Eloïse into it, we had to be moved. The same thing had happened on the outbound flight to Cancún.
Next, the stewardess complained when Sarah asked her to fill up a water bottle instead of accepting just a cupful. Sarah explained she was pregnant, but the stewardess informed her that there were other passengers and only “so much water on board”. Ridiculous.
The icing on the cake had been saved for last, however, Upon arrival in Providence, we discovered that our checked-in bag had not made it onto our flight. We had to hang around to file a lost luggage (sorry, luggage irregularity) report with a woman who was as friendly as she was dimwitted, a familiar combination here.
With that out of the way, we finally got to come back to Sarah’s folks’ house and relax.
The next day consisted of multiple frustrating phone calls to US Airways’ lost luggage centre, trying to ascertain the whereabouts of our bag and why it had not simply been put on the next flight to Providence after ours.
As you might expect, each such phone call provided bizarre new information that contradicted at least one statement made during a previous call. After a while, you seriously start to wonder whether someone might just be fucking with you, but at times like that, I remember the old adage and truism about not attributing to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity. This was never more apt than in the case of US Airways’ staff.
Tempering hopefulness with realism, I went to a shopping mall and bought some fresh underwear. I’m buggered if I’m going to stew on my own skid marks whilst waiting for US Airways to pull their bloody finger out.
The bag was finally delivered to the house this morning, which was a great relief, because we fly out of Boston again Sunday afternoon. If it had been delivered 36 hours later, we would no longer have been here to receive it and it would have had to be sent on to Amsterdam. Thankfully, that little logistical exercise has been spared us.
And there you have it: the imperfect end to a perfect trip. Never underestimate the power of glacially slow US immigration, improbably dim-witted airline staff and Monty Pythonesque inefficient airport procedures to throw a spanner in the works of your travel plans.
And so, as I mentioned, we will fly from Boston to Amsterdam tomorrow afternoon, arriving back home early Monday morning. That will be our sixth flight in just over three weeks, but also our last for the time being, as Sarah’s pregnancy is about to enter the final third of its duration.
It’s been a good trip. Christmas was fun, New Year was very low-key and Mexico was the definite highpoint. Right now, I’m just looking forward to getting back home and sleeping in my own bed.