July 19 – Vacation Extended

Well folks, we are stuck in Chicago. I’ll detail how we got to this point, but first, some things we did before hell broke loose.

I started the day by walking up the street from our Airbnb to get some last minute grocieries. On the way, someone pulled over to ask me directions to the airport. I didn’t know for sure, but I knew we had picked this Airbnb because it was close to the airport, so I dunno where this guy was having his problem. I pulled out my phone and showed him the way. Hopefully he made it! Not sure why people keep asking me for directions…at least this dude asked me first in English.

Now, although our hotel was close the airport, we seemed to be in some weird public transportation deadzone. It was about a 2.5 mile walk, but the bus ride would take an hour. We decided we wanted to Uber/cab so we could get there quickly and not have to carry our bags. However, hours before our flight, we couldn’t find any Ubers nearby! We tried this “schedule an Uber”, and that seemed to work. However, we aren’t sure if that summoned an Uber, or if the Uber drivers just started waking up closer to our airport time. Glad it worked out though!

The airport process was a little strange at Munich. We had to pass through like 4 check points, and Bae had to go through security twice. It was a little weird, but no real problems.

The flight to Chicago was pretty normal, I guess. Seemed to be an excess of screaming babies, but otherwise the same. I watched the Kingsman movies, and then some crazy Chinese sci-fi movie with Jackie Chan. Bleeding Steel, I think it was called. All were good and made the trip go by quickly! The food they served on the flight was decent as well. It was important to stay fueled up for the nightmare that was to come, especially since the nightmare began around 0200 in the time zone we were used to.

WARNING: the rest of this post is mostly just me complaining about the airport. Continue at your own risk.

So everything was fine until we landed in Chicago. We had 2 hours sheduled to get from our Lufthansa plane to our United plane that would take us to El Paso. This connection seemed tight when I booked it, but it let me book it, and I figured all should be fine if we weren’t late getting in. So wrong.

Turns out, 2 hours wasn’t even close to enough time. Now, I dunno how often some of you all travel internationally, but I was completely unaware of the process where you pick your bags up from baggage claim, recheck them, and then proceed to your terminal. I have never had to do this before, but at O’Hare, they are fancy like that. And by “fancy”, I mean, “dumber than shit”.

When we landed at O’Hare, we rushed off the plane, not knowing we would have to recheck our bags. We had to walk down a mile long hallway before finally reaching customs. We breezed through the stupid electronic check-in kiosk, then stood in line to get checked by the passport dudes. It was in this moment that Bae noticed a sign saying we had to get our bags from baggage claim. I didn’t want to believe it.

The baggage claim area was a complete and total disaster.

Originally they said our bags were coming out on 9, but they actually came out on 7. None of that confusion mattered though, nor did rushing through immigration. The bags were the bottle neck. 50 minutes after we landed, our bags showed up at baggage claim. Then we had to wait in this giantic line to get out of baggage claim into the actual airport.

Initially, this line looked totally hopeless, as in we didn’t think we could get out that night. Finally they brought more people over to check our stupid stamps, and we were through. But we were wayyyy too late. We emerged from fucking Bag Hell when our other flight was supposed to board.

The bag recheckers immediately pointed us to the rebooking line, which was overfilled because everyone else was getting fucked by this nonsense. We never would have made it because before we could have even re-entered security, we would have had to wait in this gigantic line just to get on the proper shuttle to take us to the other terminals. Total disaster.

We were rebooked for a flight tomorrow (July 20), as flights to El Paso don’t happen that often. FORTUNATELY, my dad, who is a Marriott rewards platinum diamond Ruby member, hooked us up with a hotel. I will complain to Lufthansa as well, but I don’t expect them to do anything about it. It was entirely the fault of Chicago O’Hare. That place sucks horribly.

Fortunately, we got to the hotel quite quickly, because as soon as my dad confirmed that he set us up with a hotel, I spotted the hotel shuttle, so we ran for it. We got to the hotel, then grabbed some food and beer.

I’m finishing this blog post up on July 20, and we are at the airport ready to go. It looks like we are going to make it home!

If I’m not totally dead tonight, I’ll post some travel tips for Germany/switerzland that we learned along the way.

Despite the terrible conclusion, we had a great trip! Thanks for following our journey.

-Babe