The Seventh Bag

Hello, all,

First off, apologies for the banner on top, and the previous blog entry. Apparently each member of our family has an evil French twin that we were not aware of. Kind of like that Star Trek episode, where Kirk, Scotte, Bones and Uhuru get mysteriously transported to an "evil twin" universe where they meet the evil twins of the rest of the crew. I'm working on trying to reverse the damage done...at least I've managed to regain control of the blog entries for now...

So: on to the adventure du jour - er, I mean, of the day! :) Seems one cannot be avoided whenever one flies - especially when one flies with United through O'Hare! This one is filled with intrigue, mystery, frustration, Star Trek, and ... in the vein of the recent "National Treasure" movies, numerology!

We decided to try to cart our Sleep Number bed with us in luggage bags - shipping it via UPS would've cost $600 (hmm, 600...). So instead I bought two extra bags, a hockey duffel, the biggest I could find 38x16x16 (hmm...), and a golf bag carry case, the biggest I could find. We barely managed to fit everything in. But the upshot is this: we had one extra bag to check than what is allotted to us. A seventh bag (Houston, we have blog title). Sort of like "The Seventh Seal".

True: the 7th bag costs extra money - $127 to be exact (1+2=3, and there's a seven again). But even with this fee, and the costs of the bag, we certainly come out ahead this way - but wait till you hear the rest of the story. Don't get impatient!

So we showed up at Minneapolis with our seven bags, courtesy of our friends Pete and Shannon. We managed to get our bags checked, seemingly without incident. Our itinerary was brutal: 3 legs, four total airports (3+4=7! Coincidence? You be the judge...):

Minneapolis -> United 786 -> O'Hare. (7+8+6 = 21 = 7*3)
O'Hare -> Lufthansa 435 -> Munich (4+3 = 7, what could the 5 mean?)
Munich -> Lufthansa 3680 -> Geneva (there's that 6 and 8 again...and 3+6+8=17, oooh!)

The flights were uneventful, until at Munich I had a brief panic because I thought I had lost our baggage tickets and boarding passes for the final leg. I even backtracked onto the airplane, which caused the flight crew no small consternation. Apparently I was in danger of being locked out of the rest of the airport at that early hour (~6:00 a.m. - ooh!). But in the process I discovered the baggage tickets were in my back pocket.

And then when we were being checked at the gate for our final flight, the lady at the desk briefly confiscated our baggage tickets because she said there was one bag that was not entered into the system...Hmm, shades of things to come. We then had to catch a bus to be loaded onto a Dash 8 Q400 high-wing commuter prop plane (RJ, take note!), from the tarmac, in the pre-dawn rain.
By this point, B is really feeling the long long day. Total hours of sleep in transit for us three: 0, 1 and 2 (added up equals 3!).

When we got to Geneva, we exited on the French side - really the way to go! The passport lady didn't even want to see our passports, and there's virtually no customs to speak of. But it means you have to give your baggage tickets to another guy to go over to the Swiss side and fetch them. Ah, yes, baggage tickets, where did I put them this time? Not in my back pocket, not in the backpack, not in any of several of my jacket or fleece pockets, not in K's stuff, not in any of the carry-on bags! Well, Jiminy Christmas, where did they go this time??

We can only suspect that in retrospect, the confiscation of the tickets in Munich was not so brief after all! We think she forgot to give them back to us (she must have been one of the four horsemen, behind that friendly exterior...) . This turned out to be more important than might otherwise be the case, because even though the kind gentlemen in Geneva offered to fetch our bags on the basis of our last name, he only came back with six. But where is the seventh bag?

At this point I remembered that I had noticed that the top luggage ticket of the packet I received in Minneapolis had a different name on it. But I didn't ask - I chalked it up to it being because it was "a seventh bag", above and beyond the normal quota. I thought the name was that of the lady behind the counter!

So after dropping off an exhausted wife and son at our home, I went back to the airport with the two other bags from the matched set that the missing bag comes from. I was convinced the bag was there, but wasn't recognized as ours because it didn't have our name on it. No such luck: it wasn't there. So file the paperwork, go home and take an afternoon nap.

They called back in the afternoon to say they had found it. One only needed to wait for the delivery person. He showed up after eight p.m. with a bag all right: it even had the computer-generated tags with our names on it. But it wasn't our bag! Yowsa. That means the bag was probably incorrectly tagged right at the beginning, right there in Minneapolis. K even remembers the lady who horned in right in the middle of our check-in procedure. And this means that for all intents and purposes, that seventh bag could be galloping anywhere in the world. And this is why having your baggage tickets confiscated from you becomes a double whammy. (Imagine at this point Captain Kirk quivering with rage, and yelling up at the sky: "YOUUNIIGHTED!!!!").

So Lufthansa has been sicked on the problem. Please pray them godspeed.

Happy to be back in Geneva - where sometime tonight it'll be 43 degrees - and 4+3 - well, you know the drill. Coincidence? You be the judge.
-PKBD

P.S. What's in the seventh bag, you ask? Pish tosh. Leather shaving kit, plastic bags of toiletries and K's makeup, miscellaneous clothes, and a pie pan, from what we can remember.