REALLY BIG First World Problems

 Day Vacation +1, +2

Well, the fact that I am still writing this blog might tell you something. I will document for our memories sake (and your disbelief/entertainment) our struggles to get home. 

First, I am writing this on early Sunday in Cape Town. What?!?! You're right; we were supposed to be on our way back to the States on Saturday arriving there on Sunday. Our long trip home scheduled for Saturday - Johannesburg to Cape Town to Newark to Cincinnati (yes, I did write Cincinnati because that's where we had to end up) -  did not happen. We got to Cape Town only to have our flight to Newark cancelled AGAIN! Mechanical issues ... "plane taken out of service." So, the scramble started all over again with 300 passengers (some like us who had been cancelled the day before) trying to figure out what to do.

There are untold details and 'death by a thousand paper cuts' here, but I will give the highlights. No need to read them all unless you want to suffer a bit as we did, but I am capturing them for completeness.

By the time they cancelled our flight, we got our luggage at baggage claim, schlepped that luggage backwards through the airport to the departures area, it was about 11:30 (we arrived at the gate for our flight at 7:00pm). There we were met by two 40 passenger buses that were going to shuttle us to the  hotel they had arranged. We just missed making it on the first two buses. OK, but we were at the head of the line for the next round when they returned. We figured we were going to some local airport hotel. Steve found a United representative (they were unacceptably scarce with little to no information as to what was happening) and asked where we were staying. She told Steve, "At a Southern Sun Waterfront hotel." ... Wait ... Waterfront?! That's 30 minutes away! They won't be back for an hour!!! "Yes, sir." was the overly calm reply. Adam jumped into action to find an Uber, and Steve ran (literally) to find a taxi - we were pursuing all options in parallel. The taxi came first, so we all piled into sedan taxi - luggage and all and all of our luggage.

We took the drive to the hotel - it's past midnight at this point. When we got there, the first wave of bus passengers was close to finishing up their check-in. By the time we were done checking in, the second wave of 80 bus passengers was just arriving. Whew! We knew the taxi was well worth it! [The next day, we talked some people in the third wave of bus trips and they got to the hotel around 1:30 and had to wait in a 60 person line at check-in.]

We got to our rooms. Maria got the kids settled in their room, and Adam joined Steve in his room ... computer fired up and smart phones burning up electricity faster than downtown Cape Town. We found flights that departed from Cape Town to Johannesburg (again) to Zurich to Chicago to Indy, getting us to Indy on Monday evening. That was as good as it gets! We relayed that to the United agent on the phone. We found it on their website and it was available for 5 people. The next 4.5 hours was excruciating as we 

• worked through an inept agent on the phone
• got disconnected twice
• demanded her supervisor
• waited 25 minutes for the supervisor
• went through almost 2 hours with the supervisor
• got disconnected again
• coached the supervisor on the flights we wanted REPEATEDLY, correcting him on several occasions
• until we finally got the flights we told them about 4 hours earlier.

The call started about 1AM and Steve hung up finally at around 5:15AM. In that time, Adam and Steve spoke to the agents maybe a total of 20 minutes. The rest was hold time. We kept iterating that we saw the flights on THEIR website and that we could book them right now if we wanted to pay $6000. It is actually, literally unimaginable what took so long on their end.

So, as I write this, very early on Sunday morning (who can sleep after all of this consternation?), we are headed back to the Cape Town airport for a 3:50pm flight back to (yes, you guessed it) Johannesburg. I am a bit more hopeful at this point, but we will see.

The story continue on the next blog post!