On vacation

Phew! Finally on vacation. After some long weeks with exhauting work, I believe I have earned some time off.
Starting today, my girlfriend and I have taken a week off to Paris in my sisters apartment, but the vacation didn’t start as planned: Flights are booked and bags are packed, but the evening before departure, I realize my passport isn’t where I left it. Typical! First I start of searching for myself, trying not to alarm anyone – especially my girlfriend, who will start to think the whole vacation isn’t gonna happen.
After some time searching, I have to tell her the bad news: I still haven’t found it. We start moving all furniture, in case it should have slipped down behind somewhere. We go through all bookshelves, drawers and paper-folders. All to no avail. The darn thing is still missing. After literally been through the whole apartment, the basement-compartment and my car, we phone my parents in a desperate hope that they have it. Remember, this whole incident is only few hours before departure. My parents don’t have it.
“Could I have left it in our cottage?” I start to think. “Could it have been stolen or did I accidentally drop it somewhere??”. We’re almost giving up and Camilla (which is my girlfriends name, by the way) have lost all hope on going on vacation in Paris. Ok – not all hope, but she very demoralised.
Finally in a small bag of old liveshow tickets I find my passport!!! Must have been slipped down there when I moved my stuff into Camillas apartment. Our morale is immediately boosted and we are able to get some sleep before we have to go.

Unfortunately, we overslept. We then had 50 minutes to get ready before we had to meet our friend Peter, who was driving us to the airport. Again we’re late. About 5-10 minutes. That doesn’t sound much, but then we only had 15-20 minutes to get to the airport, before we had to check-in. So it was highly valuable 5-10 minutes.
It could have been a smooth ride, but it wasn’t. Morning traffic in Copenhagen is, like all major cities, very much crowded and painfully slow. We tried to take a short-cut, but ended up on a long detour (yes yes, I take the blame). When we finally got there, we hed 40 minutes before boarding. That meant we were 20 minutes late for check-in. Thankfully, out tickets enabled us to do a so-called self check-in, so we might have been able to skip the usual waiting line at the check-in counter.
We were directed to a ATM-like machine by the informationsoffice to do the self check-in. I inserted my creditcard, on which the tickets have been reserved, and the monitor displays: Check-in is no longer possible! Damn! Fighting through traffic and now this! This couldn’t be true, so we ask a flight attendant what to do. We only had 35 minutes left before departure. She told us that we get in the waiting line to be services at the usual check-in. We took a look at the line, and it was huge! Really huge! Like an anaconda trailing though the whole airport terminal! WHAT??? Waiting in that line would seriously have taken about two hours. We knew we were late, but that could not be true. Demoralised like never before, we start to think the vacation is cursed and we will never get to Paris any time soon.
With no hope left I try another self check-in counter at the other end of the terminal! We’re able to check-in!!! Amazing! We couldn’t believe it and started to laugh! We pulled out the freshly printet boardingpasses and hurried us to the luggagedropoff. The luggage is accepted! Phew! That was about as close as it gets. 30 minuttes before boarding. We began our way to the security control and while walking away, I was mentally preparing myself for the moment when someone would come up to us, saying our check-in had been revoked due to late dropoff. But it didn’t happen. Security control and boarding went without an incident. We could finally relax! Sitting on the airplane, we couldn’t stop laughing at how tight this whole situation had gotten. We joked about how nothing could now stop us from getting to Paris. They could take away our luggage, we would still continue our journey by any means! Ironic, that wasn’t far from what was about to happen. But more on that later.

We arrived at Charles de Gulle and went for backage reclaim. After minuttes of wating, the suit-cases began to roll and one of the first ones to roll by, was Camillas. A nice change but my suit-case was ofcourse among the last to be delivered – so we thought. No, my suit-case wasn’t even on our flight. This was absolutely the low point of the day. I went to the customer service and they told me that my suit-case in fact was still at the Copenhagen airport. Not good. Thanks SAS. Though the service was very good: delivering my suit-case at the apartment where we were staying only hours later, we still had to spend our first evening inside, seeing nothing of the city until the delivery which was supposed to be between 19.00 and 19.30.
We waited at the apartment and time went by until 20.00 when we heard from the delivery again, only to tell us that he was going to be an hour late. So we waited another hour. Still no delivery. At 21.30 my lost suit-case was finally back home. Cheking the content I found that my business mobilephone had been stolen. I had taken it with me on vacation in case I needed to contact someone at work. Looking back, I know that was stupid to do, but I would never have imagined that someone would have undenied access to my suit-case for several hours. A true shame.

Phew! What a day, And this is supposed to be a vacation??

Update: Meanwhile the vacation has ended and we have had a terrific week with no incident after those described above.