Danube Waltz Viking River Cruise
Day 9: Sunday, October 27, 2019 - Travel
While we awoke in Budapest, we weren't doing any exploring today - and taking a bus ride to the airport does NOT count as exploring.
We had our usual breakfast - egg benedict and buffet. Our final meal on the ship. :-(
Then we grabbed our carry-ons, double-checked the room for any last remnants, and made our way to the bus. They were supposed to make sure we verified our baggage before it was put on the bus, but the driver didn't do that. We did spy it anyway, so we knew we were OK. We headed off to the airport. We were two of the 43 passengers from our cruise that were on our flight. However, we knew that we were two of four that were NOT taking a connecting flight to somewhere else (there may have been a couple others, but we didn't know who they may have been).
We were at the ticket counter and I put our bags on the conveyor belt. The agent that was checking us in was taking an inordinate amount of time to process our bags. Then she yelled something to someone to her right. Someone else came over and asked "What's the matter?" She responded "Their luggage was already checked in." Uh, what?!!? To make a half hour situation short, it turns out that there was someone else on our flight... that had the same last name as us! Like "Michel" was suddenly a popular name. They were headed to Ecuador. However, their luggage was headed to Philadelphia (the whole plane was obviously going to Philly, but this was just a layover for them) as another agent put OUR luggage tags on THEIR luggage. Before we were allowed to be processed, they had to rectify the other passenger's problem. Eventually they sent two new luggage tags down to the luggage loading dock to replace the erroneous tags. THEN, and only then, were we allowed to be fully processed.
After we got that situation resolved, we headed toward security. So far, our 10:25 flight to Philadelphia was on time.
We scanned our passport at the gate, but recieved an error. We tried it a couple times and an agent said "Please go over there." pointing to a counter/booth thing. We got over there, showed them our passport and ticket, and the guy at the booth said "Please go over there." pointing us to the gates we just came from. I said, pointing to the woman that told us to go to the booth, "But she told us to come over here." Then the woman said something in [presumably] Hungarian, and he scanned our tickets. "Approved." We went through security and discovered that it was the equivilent of the U.S. pre-check and in no time we were done.
We were again early for our flight, so we walked around the terminal a little, visited a couple shops, and made our way to our gate - the last one in the terminal again - and waited. We sat around, looked at our devices, spoke to some other travelers, and bided our time.
Eventually we were called to board at 10:00 AM. The woman at the ticket desk happened to be the same one that checked in our baggage.
They boarded front to back. Why don't they board back to front? All the poeple going to the back have to wait for the people in the front to get the hell out of the way. Why not let the people in the back make their way to the back, and keep adding people as the passengers move futher back. We asked the steward about this and he told us that they did studies and determined it made no difference, and in fact random seating is the fastest method for seating passengers. Who knew?!!? It certainly would have helped us board if they did it back to front because we were seated in the last row. The very last row.
We sat for 40 (forty) minutes before we moved. While in flight, Linda listened to her audio book, while I generally tried to listen to the movies that were playing. There were three, as well as some TV (it was a long flight): Spiderman Far From Home, Goosebumps 2, Momma Mia! 2, and Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
At about 11:30, we had crackers with cheese, a small salad, bread, pasta (they ran out of chicken), and vanilla and chocolate cake with coconut. With wine.
At about 3:00 PM, we had a pretzel snack. With wine.
At about 7:30, we had a Hot Pocket like food item - Linda had the spinach and goat cheese, and I had the buffalo chicken. With wine.
This should be Iceland.
I read the magazine in the seatback in front of me. There was an article titled "Spotlight: Delaware". What are the odds of that?
(For our non-local friends and family or those that may not be aware, we actually live in Delaware.)
Speaking of long flights, our flight was 10 hours in the air. And we passed five time zones. Not six, but only five because while we were in Europe (Budapest) on the last night, we observed the transition to Standard Time - a week before it was observed in the US.
We stopped at the supermarket on our way home to pick up perishables for the week ahead: milk, salad, and fruit. Then completed the last leg of our journey arriving at home.
That's it for this trip. Our next journey is planned for next spring where we will be visiting the
capitals of the Northeast U.S.
Thanks for reading.