Groundhog Day for us

Wednesday March 17th, 2010

We took the train in from Roma Station to the airport. As we got our bags in a gentlemen with a suit and name tag, Marco, helped me with my bag onto train. He asked if we were flying internationally and he told us which stop to get off on. At first we thought he was a businessman and was really helpful. He boarded the plane behind us and walked away. I had noticed he had a tie tack with a train on it and wondered if he worked for the city or something. He came back and talked to us. He is one of 12 customer service reps that work on the trains to help people and cleans us newspapers, etc left behind. It is a new initiative for the city and they plan to add 12 more positions. He is one of three that were on this train.

Our flight was on time. It was weird leaving Australia at 11 am on Wednesday, 3/17 and arriving to the States at 6:45 am on Wednesday, 3/17. Neither of us were able to sleep much on the plane so pretty exhausted. We thought about going into the city to Chinatown for lunch but decided to head to our domestic terminal and see if we could catch an earlier flight. Our ticketed flight was to leave at 3 pm and arrive Boston through Chicago O’Hare at 1 am. Long, long 24 hours.

After a long wait to get through security, we headed to AA customer service. The lady said that since we didn’t have our luggage it would be hard to get us on another flight since domestically we needed to travel with our luggage. We explained to her that someone at the gate said she could transfer our luggage. So she looked us up in the computer and saw that Steve was gold priority plus and then started asking us what our luggage looked like. (He received an email right before our trip that he was in the million mile club even because of 20 some years of using our business credit card not flying a million miles : ) This also helped us catch that flight to San Francisco as well. What a blessing! ) She put us on standby for a direct flight to Boston leaving at 1 pm and arriving at 9 pm. So we prayed that we could get on the flight.

A quick breakfast and then trying to nap, stay awake, and watch the standby list. No wireless available at the airport. Fortunately several people requested upgrades to first class so Steve and I made the flight even though we didn’t sit together. We were just happy to be on a 5 1/4 hour flight rather than waiting 2 more hours and then 10 more hours of flying and airports.