Travelling light

"I have to tell you," said Consuelo, the Princess Cruises rep, as we wait for the hotel shuttle bus, "You are very positive people!"

The sky is overcast when we leave home yesterday morning,  but with no hint of the fog that blankets the Victoria airport when we arrive there a half hour later.  "We may be calling you to take us back", jokes Tom to the cabbie.  How prophetic.  After watching the fog grow thicker and thicker, Alaska Airlines bows to the inevitable and cancels our flight. 

I wheel Tom back to the Alaska desk where we wait with all the other passengers on the flight to get rebooked.  We get the same excellent ticket agent, and pretty much the same schedule,  just a four hour delayed departure from Victoria and a two hour delayed arrival in LA.  I phone Princess and give them our new flight information.  Alaska looks after retagging the luggage.

Tight turnaround in Seattle:  Immigration forms, passport control, baggage claim, baggage recheck, three trains to get to the new gate, bathroom stop(!!), arrival at the gate with the last group of boarding passengers for the flight to LA.  Couldn't have done it without the wheelchair assistant,  a quiet-spoken young man who knows all the shortcuts through the airport.

LA.  Terminal 6 is under renovation so passage through it is extraordinarily complicated.  Another wheelchair, another assistant, who takes us by elevator down one floor, then outside the terminal (Were we not clear that we were going to baggage claim?), down another floor in an outside elevator, then back inside the terminal to ... tada! ... baggage claim.  "Most of the inside elevators don't work," he says.

As we wait for the suitcases to arrive on the carousel, Consuelo approaches.  "Are you the Thompsons?", she asks.  (She says that after many years doing this job, she can easily pick her passengers out of any crowd.)  Princess has asked her to wait for us,  their delayed passengers,  and we are her last pickup of the night.  She comes with a luggage trolley and we wait.  One orange suitcase arrives almost immediately.  The walker appears at the oversized luggage desk.  No second orange suitcase.  

The wheelchair assistant takes us to the lost luggage desk where we make our claim.  That turnaround in Seattle was too quick for one of our suitcases;  it missed the flight and is arriving on a later one.  "Going on a cruise?" the guy on the desk says.  "I'll make sure it's delivered to your hotel tonight."  "Next time I see you, I'll buy you a drink", says Tom.  "Thanks, but if I see you again,  it means we've messed up again.  Just have one for me!"

So we did. 

And the missing suitcase arrived about midnight.