Let the trip begin....

On June 25th, 2007 The Matthews family headed off into the great unknown commonly known as Central Europe. To the observer's eye and to those involved it was a vacation that started off a bit bumpy. Having made it to the car park with fairly good time we unloaded our shall we say rather extensive pile, one luggage plus on carry-on person with an additional one or two bags for four people comes out to about ten bags, out of the car. Once that was done Dad goes into the office to leave the keys with them only to learn that they want him to leave the keys for the car in the car. Makes sense. That is until Mom turns around to him asking him where he put their set of keys for the car. The answer is...in the car, which she has just locked manually. Well they had two weeks to get into the car considering that it was in a place that they most probably would have wanted to move it at some point in time.

A minor setback that has two weeks to work itself out. After telling the car park people the situation it is a quick drive to Newark Liberty International Airport. Now the question was which airlines? With a quick stop at the United Airlines Terminal we find that we are in the wrong terminal because though there is a United Airlines Number we will be flying on Lufthansa Airlines, which along with United Airlines is part of the Star Alliance. Off to Terminal A which houses Lufthansa Airlines.

Lufthansa still does check-in "old school style" where you still have to go up to the counter and they are ones to check you in unlike some of the other airlines like Continental which allows you to do that via "self-check in". Making it to the front of the line and up to the counter we in encounter what appears to be a trainee. Upon further observation it appears that the whole Lufthansa Airlines counter is being run by trainees with supervisors watching from behind. This little fact turns outs not to be in our favour as time it turns out that the trainee makes a mistake that leaves Dad with two tickets out to Frankfurt, Germany and Mom without one. Just a minor problem one would think. Not the case it seems. We now have to have the whole check-in cancelled and we have to go back to Customer Service to have the whole thing sorted out. This is fine except we are slowly running out of time and we still have to go through security and to still have our bags checked in. Finally there is a light at the end of the tunnel and by 4:30, forty-five minutes before departure, everything is solved...at least in the sense that we are all on the plane.

Setback this time around is that because it took them so long to correct the mistake everyone else on the flight had been more or less checked in leaving us with seats with two seats together and two seat scattered. The only solution to that minor dilemma is to go up to the desk at the gate and see if there are any available seats together. The answer turns out to be a no. Option two ends up being asking people to see if they would mind exchanging seats with you. A process that definitely complies with all airline safety regulations I am sure. The end result being that Dad managed to get the woman sitting next to him and Mom to exchange seats with me and leaving Karlena on the other side of the plane several rows up.

The good news is that we managed to make it to Frankfurt without any more little upsets. From Frankfort we flew into Budapest, Hungary, again with no more little "annoyances". Now the journey really begins.