let the adventures begin

We have safely made it to Potro, our first stop on our 2 month journey. The travel here was definitely not for the faint of heart, we certainly had our patience tested. 

First, the flight from Calgary was delayed and here's the 10 reasons why:

at the gate the Lufthansa staff were telling us:

1.  "A short 15-20 minute delay for unknown reasons", The plane was late.

2. "Boarding crew needed a bit more time to prep the plane" 

3. "Have to we wait for two luggage"

Finally we board 1 hour late

Our pilot with a calm accented German voice informed us that there would be another delay because:

4. "there were a couple of people that needed to disembark, and had to retrieve their luggage" 

5. "a tire was low, and had to fill it"

6. "the baggage compartment door was frozen shut"

7. "had to fill two more tires" (may have had some thing to do with the cold weather it was -26)

ok! we are ready to go! Finally I felt like I should clap. We moved approximately 200 feet 

8. Now we can finally move and we did about 200ft and the truck pushing the plane out broke down.

So we had to wait for a new one.

9. And then we are off to be de-iced

Finally we take off 31/2 hours later

Just before landing the pilot informs us this will be a quick unloading as we would have a priority gate.

he was wrong... 

10. the airport staff had forgotten about us, yep forgot about us, I know you're thinking how could they forget about a whole plane? well as we were standing in line still on the aircraft waiting to get off, Husband was speaking with the stewardess and she was saying that Lufthansa Air is known for forgetting little things like that. Because this is not the first time this has happened, for example she said there was a time that everyone was ready to board and they had actually forgotten to pull the plane up to the loading doors....what the heck man, you had one job.

 And so we waited out on the tarmac, had to wait for them to find stairs and buses to transport us to the airport. Only another 20 mins.😩 

So it started with drama and ended with just a tad more. 

Because we were 3 1/2 hours delayed we missed our connecting flight in Frankfurt and so the airline re booked us on a Swiss flight, of course we didn't know that until we landed. The pilot over the intercom told us to find  Lufthansa ground support staff to advise us on our flight status. And If you didn't know Frankfurt Airport is the largest hub for air travel in Europe...so needless to say we put on a few steps there. Real fast! Even using the escaladers we just made it to the gate on time for the new connection now to Zürich, yay we got to go to Switzerland!

 

As we found our seats on Swiss Air we heard the pilot say we were just waiting for two more bags and then we would be off to Portugal. We assumed those bags were ours, we assumed wrong, but more on that later. 

Swiss air was beautiful, spacious and informative we learned where we were to go once we landed from the screens relaying this important information, in the plane, this was great because the boarding passes issued us were minimal.

Finally we land in Porto. And I have to say what a beautiful sunset welcome. 

We disembark and find the luggage carrousel. We see as all the other folks find and grab their luggage from the rotating belt, slowly as we watched the belt empty our tired brains realized our luggage in fact was not there and our 30 hour day is not done yet!

So seeing and disregarding the lost and found sign we leave the area to find support. We find the information booth and she tells us to proceed to the card office he gives us a ticket stub with a number and one of us will be permitted back into the luggage pick up area that we were not supposed to leave in the first place, so that we could go to the lost and found to make a claim...oh boy. 

So with the claim done we taxied to our apartment. Exhausted!