Coming Home

Friday was our going home day.  Our flight plan was Copenhagen to Toronto, Canada.  Toronto to Denver, then Denver to St. George.  We were to arrive in St. George around 10pm.

Replicas of the iconic mermaid statue are everywhere in Copenhagen.  This was at the airport when we were leaving.

I took close up of some of the detail of the statue.  I'm not sure what she is holding.

Our flight to Toronto was delayed, making us about 45 minutes late arriving in Toronto.  Toronto is a nightmare airport.  You have to go through customs.  Our time was so tight. The machines wouldn't work that check your passport, then the line to get through the passport agent had hundreds of people with ONE agent checking everyone.  Finally another three agents came.  We were so nervous, watching the minutes tick by as we waited in that long line.  Then we had to wait for our luggage to be cleared.  Then we had to run a considerable distance to our gate.  We ran to the gate, sweaty and hot and breathing heavy.  The plane was still there, but they had closed the airplane door.  We had missed our flight to Denver by maybe two minutes.  We were directed to a customer service desk.  Ken spent over an hour there with an agent who was most helpful and tried everything she could to get us home that night, but it just wasn't possible.  She did get us out on a later flight to Denver, gave us food vouchers for that evening and the next day, and a voucher for a hotel in Denver.  She was very kind.  I felt so bad for Ken.  By now, he had a terrible cold, and in the rush to get to the gate hadn't had time to even go to the rest room.  But his gentle kindness with the customer service agent, I'm sure helped her to want to do all she could for us.  The man is good in a crisis.

At the customer service counter in Toronto.  Ken was there for over an hour.  I finally went and found a bench to wait on while he worked through it all.

The customer service agent must have put a note in our file because we were given first class seats on our flight to Denver and the next day on our flight to St. George  That was nice.  Really nice.  We were so tired, but I didn't want to sleep because I didn't want to miss the time in first class!  By this time, Ken was feeling terrible with a terrible cold and we had been up for over 34 hours.  We were exhausted.  Travel is not for the feint of heart.

When we got to Denver, we found out our luggage was lost.  No one knew where it was. They sent us to a hotel and gave us travel kits, including little bottles of good stuff, a shirt for Ken, etc.  My "Just in case" philosophy finally paid off.  I always put extra underwear and a shirt in my carry on for this very eventuality!  My, didn't I feel wise!

The hotel was very nice, but we got little sleep because of Ken's terrible cough.  The next day, we had breakfast and lunch at the hotel before they took us to the airport for our evening flight to St. George.

When we got to the airport, I received a call from the St. George airport saying they had our luggage in storage there.  Yea!

Our friends, Travis and Jilynne greeted us at the airport with a welcome home sign.  That was so nice.  And oh it was good to be home!

We feel so blessed to get to go on this wonderful trip! It truly was a highlight of our lives!!