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December 20, 2005
Incommunicado
Finally back from vacation and ApacheCon. Sigh. It was my fourth ApacheCon and I think so far it was the most interesting one.
Unfortunately, the hard drive of my notebook crashed on the last conference day (fortunately *after* my presentations) so from that time on, I was forced to stay offline (which of course is good for a vacation). The last three days in San Diego were really great, visiting the Zoo, Balboa Park and the Wild Animal Park. Nice.
The travel back from San Diego reminded my a little bit of my trip back from Amsterdam. Now, we made it in time to the San Diego Airport and were confronted with bad weather in San Francisco. As we had to change planes in San Fransisco and everything was either cancelled or delayed from and to SF, we were rebooked on an earlier flight from San Diego to SF to be able to catch our plan to Frankfurt. Ok, now you can guess what happened...right...our plane was not allowed to leave San Diego because of the situation in SF and finally, when we landed in SF and got out of the plane it was 14:25. Our flight to Frankfurt was scheduled to 14:15 and although everyone from UA promised us in San Diego that they will wait, this seemed to be the only flight out of SF an that day that left in time...
So we had to queue up at Customer Services (like everyone else), waited in the queue for two and a half our, and got in the standby list for a flight to London. This was at 17:35 and the flight to London was scheduled for 18:10...so we had to go to the UA international ticket counter, got some boarding cards on standby, had to go through security, run to the gate (which was the farrest possible of course) and arrived there at 18:05 - fortunately, this flight was delayed as well, we got the last two seats and of we went to London - not sure how we would get from there to Paderborn...
We arrived in London yesterday, got a flight from there to Munich and from Munich to Paderborn and although there were problems in Munich due to snow and everything was delayed there as well, we arrived happily yesterday late in the evening.
Now during the whole travel we tried to avoid worrying about our luggage - the above is just a summary - in fact we were booked in different planes from London to Munich and from Munich to Paderborn than we actually took. So, we are back but of course our luggage is somewhere traveling around the world, hopefully writing a postcard at sometime. The good part is: as my notebook is not working anyway, I packed it into the luggage, so I have vacation until my notebook is back again... :)
Posted by cziegeler at December 20, 2005 09:23 AM