Summary: despite all of its efforts, KLM did not prevent KJ and me from returning home. Our luggage was less lucky.
I will try to do actual rest of trip commentary at some point but this bit needs out of my brain. Also making this one public for the sake of the dramatic whingeing.
It did not start out badly, actually. I had made arrangements with the front desk to have a cab show up at 9am, I managed to scrape together the executive function to do 95% of the packing the night before (not meds, toothbrushes, or electronics, basically), and while I didn't sleep well, I didn't expect to. (One of my neurodivergence features is the 'oh, you have to do something in the morning? why don't we not sleep so we don't sleep through it!' glitch. I actually slept pretty well for a night with that sort of thing in play, a chunk of 3-4 hours and a couple of dozy naps.)
Planning for this sort of thing means knowing I'm going to be sleep-deprived in the morning and offloading as much executive function as possible before then. So in the morning we grabbed the last things, triple-checked the room, checked out, and waited for the cab with our stuff. (Stuff consisting of: one large red suitcase, one small and occasionally recalcitrant to wheel black suitcase, my backpack, KJ's backpack, and a small canvas bag of snacks. Plus KJ's Switch, which eventually went into the snacks bag for useful consolidation.) Cab took us to Buchanan Bus Depot listening to morning radio, which is a universal phenomenon, clearly. ("What do you call a singing computer?" "I don't know." "A Dell!") Fumbled paying the gent but sorted it out, went in to get bus tickets.
After a little blundering around the depot, we found the ticket counter and got told there was a bus in three minutes and we could run over and pay the driver, or we could get the one in a half hour. We elected not to rush, which turned out to be a good idea several times over, and got our tickets. Then we got food - I got a sausage roll, KJ got a triple-chocolate muffin in honor of the Olympics (if you know, you know) - and we waited for the bus, then got on the bus.
The bus trip to the Edinburgh Airport was reasonably pleasant. We hadn't seen much countryside since we were in two cities, so I took a lot of photos out the window. (I have so many thoughts about the way the colors and color saturation are different from what I'm familiar with, but none of them are very articulate.) We got to the airport uneventfully, and discovered that we could not check in (despite it being less than three hours until the flight, as my American nerves suggested was a minimum) because they had not opened the ticket counter to that option. Further, the flight was already listed as 20 minutes delayed.
We found a place to lurk, and at 11:27 I went to check the board (which had said that checkin information would be posted at 11:25). It was not posted. Eventually I heard someone asking an airport official where the checkin was, and got directed to counters 44-46. (This was actually 43-45, I think, but close ebloodynough.) I collected KJ and the bags, we checked in and handed over a suitcase (large, red), and made our way through security.
Edinburgh security, unlike Boston security, did not appear concerned about the antlers on my hat, but it was concerned about whether our box of fudge was actually C4. That was amusing. KJ went to wait and play Pokemon while I was dealing with security and when I found them there was a lovely tableau of a small child watching them play that I did not get a photo of because as soon as I found my phone the small child returned to her mother. (Who was amused by my disappointment.)
Despite the length of the time we were in security, by the time we got into the terminal proper there was no gate assignment. So we found a bench, sat on it, and eventually KJ got up to peer at the local deli and came back to tell me we needed to go to gate 2. So we went to gate 2, I took a detour to pee and fill my water bottle, and we wound up dealing with a chatty ex-pat who enquired about our trip, who had been visiting her son for Fringe, and who was highly disappointed with KLM for making her miss her flight back to Dusseldorf again with these shitty delays. (My comment was that I had not been on KLM since 1993 so I had no idea how they were doing, heh.)
They called the first two sections to board (we were in section 4) and a queue formed. And stood there. Eventually KJ asked if we should maybe join the queue? So we did? Around then they did "last call for this flight" announcements (without, to my perception, calling our section at any point). Also without, at any point, letting anyone in the queue board the goddamn plane.
Meanwhile I am texting with people at home who are talking about how the tracker says the flight should get us there in plenty of time to make our connection, if a bit hurried, and I ask "When do they say it's going to leave though?" Got a time. The time was very soon. Nobody had yet boarded. "Oh," said E. "I thought you said they called for boarding." Wlel they had! They just weren't letting anyone board!
Eventually they started letting people in. Eventually we got through, even, and into a hall where there was a ribbon closing off one passage and the other led to ... a staircase. Dubiously, we went down the staircase, ran into a "HIGH VISION CLOTHING PAST THIS POINT" and hit a door to the tarmac, which seemed Wrong. Went back up the stairs. Went down the stairs, ventured out onto the tarmac, found the plane off in the distance with more stairs. Felt inadequately guided. Got on the plane.
Plane was a short hop so we declined cheese sandwiches for reasons of executive function. Maybe should've gotten something because a sausage roll only goes so far but eh. Eventually the pilot came on and basically said "I am terribly sorry about the delay, there were issues getting the plane in, the Edinburgh ground crew was inefficient on top of that, if you want to register a complaint here's how, I certainly intend to". Which was funny, at least.
We got to Amsterdam (45 minutes late on a 70 minute layover with "doors on the airplane close 15 minutes before we leave"), with the flight crew saying we had a quick change flight at F4 (and we were coming in somewhere in the deep Ds). As opposed to my usual method for dealing with planes (let many people leave before arguing with the luggage because augh) I went to pull the carryon and get off fast because quick change. I have been in the Amsterdam airport three times, I think, and two of them have involved hurrying with bags and hitting all the conveyor belt peoplemovers I could to get somewhere....
It is important for those who have not been in the Amsterdam airport to understand that it is larger than Ruritania.
(I want to add in here that all of this is made more complicated by the part where one of my particular sensory glitches is hot, close, humid air has a tendency to escalate me to panic attacks, which works really well when trying to mask while scurrying through a goddamn airport in a state of emotional agitation. The functionality vs. risk calculations in here were really fucking messy.)
I wound up with hideous cramps in my shin, somehow, but we made it to F4, I gasped "is this F4?" and the person there was "Yes." And then in baffled tones, "Did you run here?"
Yes. Yes I fucking did. Well, go as fast as I could sustain with shin cramps and etc. rather than run but whatever.
I gasped some explanation about coming in from the delayed flight, we got checked in, we got into our seats and collapsed. I played solitaire on the back of the chair in front of me (there was a computer version) until I won one and could stop. (Could not stop before winning one because brains.)
I managed to get on the airplane's free texting service and was texting family and![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jenett on and off through the flight. (Jenett mostly about how intensely meta The Matrix: Resurrections is, which I found delightful honestly.) The flight was... a flight. My knees kept seizing up and needing to be moved to pop so they would stop hurting, which got harder and harder as the guy in the chair in front of me kept finding more ways of ratcheting his seat back in an attempt, apparently, to crush me to death. But that is at least normal plane shenanigans. They fed us twice (a decent airplane meal, and then a piece of pizza; both necessary).
We got in a little before 6:30, so 11:30 by body clock. And we went, not very optimistically, to baggage claim in search of the red bag. The airtag in the case claimed it was last seen in Amsterdam, Terminal D. We expected it had not made the change. A moment of hope appeared when a similar case spawned out of the baggage! But upon close inspection it was not ours, the red was too bright and it didn't have grey on the latches. When no more bags appeared to be appearing, we went through customs.
Along with the entire population, apparently, of Ruritania. It took a minute.
Then we went to find an airport person to tell us where to complain about a lost bag. He sent us upstairs to the KLM checkin desk. The escalator up was not functioning due to drama I don't understand so we queued for the elevator. That also took a minute. We got to customer service for KLM. They sent us downstairs. "She's next to the Dunkin' Donuts."
We went back downstairs. No escalator drama required, fortunately. On the way to finding the complaints counter, KJ said, "I think we deserve a donut" and when we were queued went to get donuts, even managing to score my favorite, which I did not eat, because I was desperately holding together my executive function with my teeth and trying to juggle One More Thing, even a donut, was not happening.
The complaints queue was being held down by one person who was also responsible for the high-interrupt luggage transfers for people going from international to domestic flights. Further, she appeared to be having some trouble with her computer and her English was not great. The complaints queue took for-fucking-ever, but we eventually got assurances that most bags are merely delayed, not lost, and gave information, and arranged for the bag to be just fucking delivered to my house when they find it. In theory. She said she had the information in the system and I would get an email or a text. Has this happened? No. (The airtag indicates that the bag has moved to Terminal E though.)
We found the out. We contacted K for pickup (he had been lurking in a satellite lot for like an hour and a half by this point) and told him where we were. Commence the Drama Of Last Straw, which was the cars circulating around and around and only a random selection of them being allowed to stop to pick up their passengers and eventually us being told that passenger pickup was in Lot 1 (adjacent) and we needed to be picked up there. Access to Lot 1 was being denied. K circled around, I overheard an "I don't need to park, I just need to pick up my wife RIGHT THERE" while we were on the phone.
KJ asked me for the battery for their phone to charge and I did not have a complete fucking meltdown about it. They immediately spotted that this had been One Thing Too Many and apologised. I went to sit on the sidewalk and not cry.
K parked and came to find us after giving me instructions on how to find him that I was incapable of parsing because by this point it was like 2am my bodyclock time and the past nineteen hours of consciousness had all been awful. (Okay the bus was nice but it still took executive function to manage.) We found the car (next to a boxy blue thing with license plate T4RDIS, so that was nice). We got in the car.
I gave KJ the battery.
I said "Can I have my goddamn donut."
We went home.
I will try to do actual rest of trip commentary at some point but this bit needs out of my brain. Also making this one public for the sake of the dramatic whingeing.
It did not start out badly, actually. I had made arrangements with the front desk to have a cab show up at 9am, I managed to scrape together the executive function to do 95% of the packing the night before (not meds, toothbrushes, or electronics, basically), and while I didn't sleep well, I didn't expect to. (One of my neurodivergence features is the 'oh, you have to do something in the morning? why don't we not sleep so we don't sleep through it!' glitch. I actually slept pretty well for a night with that sort of thing in play, a chunk of 3-4 hours and a couple of dozy naps.)
Planning for this sort of thing means knowing I'm going to be sleep-deprived in the morning and offloading as much executive function as possible before then. So in the morning we grabbed the last things, triple-checked the room, checked out, and waited for the cab with our stuff. (Stuff consisting of: one large red suitcase, one small and occasionally recalcitrant to wheel black suitcase, my backpack, KJ's backpack, and a small canvas bag of snacks. Plus KJ's Switch, which eventually went into the snacks bag for useful consolidation.) Cab took us to Buchanan Bus Depot listening to morning radio, which is a universal phenomenon, clearly. ("What do you call a singing computer?" "I don't know." "A Dell!") Fumbled paying the gent but sorted it out, went in to get bus tickets.
After a little blundering around the depot, we found the ticket counter and got told there was a bus in three minutes and we could run over and pay the driver, or we could get the one in a half hour. We elected not to rush, which turned out to be a good idea several times over, and got our tickets. Then we got food - I got a sausage roll, KJ got a triple-chocolate muffin in honor of the Olympics (if you know, you know) - and we waited for the bus, then got on the bus.
The bus trip to the Edinburgh Airport was reasonably pleasant. We hadn't seen much countryside since we were in two cities, so I took a lot of photos out the window. (I have so many thoughts about the way the colors and color saturation are different from what I'm familiar with, but none of them are very articulate.) We got to the airport uneventfully, and discovered that we could not check in (despite it being less than three hours until the flight, as my American nerves suggested was a minimum) because they had not opened the ticket counter to that option. Further, the flight was already listed as 20 minutes delayed.
We found a place to lurk, and at 11:27 I went to check the board (which had said that checkin information would be posted at 11:25). It was not posted. Eventually I heard someone asking an airport official where the checkin was, and got directed to counters 44-46. (This was actually 43-45, I think, but close ebloodynough.) I collected KJ and the bags, we checked in and handed over a suitcase (large, red), and made our way through security.
Edinburgh security, unlike Boston security, did not appear concerned about the antlers on my hat, but it was concerned about whether our box of fudge was actually C4. That was amusing. KJ went to wait and play Pokemon while I was dealing with security and when I found them there was a lovely tableau of a small child watching them play that I did not get a photo of because as soon as I found my phone the small child returned to her mother. (Who was amused by my disappointment.)
Despite the length of the time we were in security, by the time we got into the terminal proper there was no gate assignment. So we found a bench, sat on it, and eventually KJ got up to peer at the local deli and came back to tell me we needed to go to gate 2. So we went to gate 2, I took a detour to pee and fill my water bottle, and we wound up dealing with a chatty ex-pat who enquired about our trip, who had been visiting her son for Fringe, and who was highly disappointed with KLM for making her miss her flight back to Dusseldorf again with these shitty delays. (My comment was that I had not been on KLM since 1993 so I had no idea how they were doing, heh.)
They called the first two sections to board (we were in section 4) and a queue formed. And stood there. Eventually KJ asked if we should maybe join the queue? So we did? Around then they did "last call for this flight" announcements (without, to my perception, calling our section at any point). Also without, at any point, letting anyone in the queue board the goddamn plane.
Meanwhile I am texting with people at home who are talking about how the tracker says the flight should get us there in plenty of time to make our connection, if a bit hurried, and I ask "When do they say it's going to leave though?" Got a time. The time was very soon. Nobody had yet boarded. "Oh," said E. "I thought you said they called for boarding." Wlel they had! They just weren't letting anyone board!
Eventually they started letting people in. Eventually we got through, even, and into a hall where there was a ribbon closing off one passage and the other led to ... a staircase. Dubiously, we went down the staircase, ran into a "HIGH VISION CLOTHING PAST THIS POINT" and hit a door to the tarmac, which seemed Wrong. Went back up the stairs. Went down the stairs, ventured out onto the tarmac, found the plane off in the distance with more stairs. Felt inadequately guided. Got on the plane.
Plane was a short hop so we declined cheese sandwiches for reasons of executive function. Maybe should've gotten something because a sausage roll only goes so far but eh. Eventually the pilot came on and basically said "I am terribly sorry about the delay, there were issues getting the plane in, the Edinburgh ground crew was inefficient on top of that, if you want to register a complaint here's how, I certainly intend to". Which was funny, at least.
We got to Amsterdam (45 minutes late on a 70 minute layover with "doors on the airplane close 15 minutes before we leave"), with the flight crew saying we had a quick change flight at F4 (and we were coming in somewhere in the deep Ds). As opposed to my usual method for dealing with planes (let many people leave before arguing with the luggage because augh) I went to pull the carryon and get off fast because quick change. I have been in the Amsterdam airport three times, I think, and two of them have involved hurrying with bags and hitting all the conveyor belt peoplemovers I could to get somewhere....
It is important for those who have not been in the Amsterdam airport to understand that it is larger than Ruritania.
(I want to add in here that all of this is made more complicated by the part where one of my particular sensory glitches is hot, close, humid air has a tendency to escalate me to panic attacks, which works really well when trying to mask while scurrying through a goddamn airport in a state of emotional agitation. The functionality vs. risk calculations in here were really fucking messy.)
I wound up with hideous cramps in my shin, somehow, but we made it to F4, I gasped "is this F4?" and the person there was "Yes." And then in baffled tones, "Did you run here?"
Yes. Yes I fucking did. Well, go as fast as I could sustain with shin cramps and etc. rather than run but whatever.
I gasped some explanation about coming in from the delayed flight, we got checked in, we got into our seats and collapsed. I played solitaire on the back of the chair in front of me (there was a computer version) until I won one and could stop. (Could not stop before winning one because brains.)
I managed to get on the airplane's free texting service and was texting family and
jenett on and off through the flight. (Jenett mostly about how intensely meta The Matrix: Resurrections is, which I found delightful honestly.) The flight was... a flight. My knees kept seizing up and needing to be moved to pop so they would stop hurting, which got harder and harder as the guy in the chair in front of me kept finding more ways of ratcheting his seat back in an attempt, apparently, to crush me to death. But that is at least normal plane shenanigans. They fed us twice (a decent airplane meal, and then a piece of pizza; both necessary).We got in a little before 6:30, so 11:30 by body clock. And we went, not very optimistically, to baggage claim in search of the red bag. The airtag in the case claimed it was last seen in Amsterdam, Terminal D. We expected it had not made the change. A moment of hope appeared when a similar case spawned out of the baggage! But upon close inspection it was not ours, the red was too bright and it didn't have grey on the latches. When no more bags appeared to be appearing, we went through customs.
Along with the entire population, apparently, of Ruritania. It took a minute.
Then we went to find an airport person to tell us where to complain about a lost bag. He sent us upstairs to the KLM checkin desk. The escalator up was not functioning due to drama I don't understand so we queued for the elevator. That also took a minute. We got to customer service for KLM. They sent us downstairs. "She's next to the Dunkin' Donuts."
We went back downstairs. No escalator drama required, fortunately. On the way to finding the complaints counter, KJ said, "I think we deserve a donut" and when we were queued went to get donuts, even managing to score my favorite, which I did not eat, because I was desperately holding together my executive function with my teeth and trying to juggle One More Thing, even a donut, was not happening.
The complaints queue was being held down by one person who was also responsible for the high-interrupt luggage transfers for people going from international to domestic flights. Further, she appeared to be having some trouble with her computer and her English was not great. The complaints queue took for-fucking-ever, but we eventually got assurances that most bags are merely delayed, not lost, and gave information, and arranged for the bag to be just fucking delivered to my house when they find it. In theory. She said she had the information in the system and I would get an email or a text. Has this happened? No. (The airtag indicates that the bag has moved to Terminal E though.)
We found the out. We contacted K for pickup (he had been lurking in a satellite lot for like an hour and a half by this point) and told him where we were. Commence the Drama Of Last Straw, which was the cars circulating around and around and only a random selection of them being allowed to stop to pick up their passengers and eventually us being told that passenger pickup was in Lot 1 (adjacent) and we needed to be picked up there. Access to Lot 1 was being denied. K circled around, I overheard an "I don't need to park, I just need to pick up my wife RIGHT THERE" while we were on the phone.
KJ asked me for the battery for their phone to charge and I did not have a complete fucking meltdown about it. They immediately spotted that this had been One Thing Too Many and apologised. I went to sit on the sidewalk and not cry.
K parked and came to find us after giving me instructions on how to find him that I was incapable of parsing because by this point it was like 2am my bodyclock time and the past nineteen hours of consciousness had all been awful. (Okay the bus was nice but it still took executive function to manage.) We found the car (next to a boxy blue thing with license plate T4RDIS, so that was nice). We got in the car.
I gave KJ the battery.
I said "Can I have my goddamn donut."
We went home.