I should say, what a LONG trip home. We had a 5am (eastern time) wake up call in Niagara Falls this morning, and a 9am flight out of Rochester, NY. Rochester is about an hour and a half from the Falls by bus.

We got to the airport about 7:15am…to find NOBODY at the counter for Northwest Airlines. The counter personnel didn’t know we were coming! By 8:00am, NOBODY had made their way through the ticketing counter. When they finally got us moving through the ticketing counter, they put whichever bag tags on the bags they could find (this is an important fact…store that away for future reference!).

When we got to the gate, they announced that they needed 4 people to volunteer to fly on a later flight. Turns out the plane was not only too heavy, but also too full!

Nobody volunteered, and they put us all on the flight. Needless to say, we knew we weren’t going to get all our bags on that flight. Our flight to Detroit was supposed to leave at 9:05am. We backed away from the gate at 9:45am, and then had to get de-iced. We left the ground about 10am.

We landed in Detroit about a half an hour before our flight to Minneapolis was to take off. If you’ve never been to the Detroit airport, a half an hour to make your way from one side of the airport to the next isn’t much time. We got to the gate about ten minutes before we were supposed to take off. THEY WEREN’T EVEN BOARDING THE PLANE YET!

It was snowing in Detroit, they were missing 28 people from a flight (us!) and they were missing nearly 60 bags, so they weren’t in much of a hurry.

We boarded the plane (a much larger plane than our first flight) only to find out that the second plane was also too heavy!

We were supposed to leave at noon eastern, and didn’t get off the ground until almost 1pm. When we landed in Minneapolis, we made our way to the baggage claim area, only to find A BUNCH of bags weren’t there!

How many is a bunch? NINE! The biggest problem (if you remember the first part of this story) was that we didn’t know which baggage claim ticket was on which bag. So, we all went through each bag that did arrive and compared that number to the baggage claim numbers we had. Once we had the nine baggage claim numbers that didn’t arrive, we could go to the Northwest lost baggage desk to try to find out where the bags were. Turns out, the bags will be in Bemidji late tonight, on the last flight into Bemidji from Minneapolis.

We should have left the Minneapolis airport around 1pm central. We finally left at 3pm. We got back to Bemidji around 7pm.

So, a 4am central wake up call, turns into a 15 hour travel day.

All I can say, is by the time we got back to Bemidji, it was a good thing that 4 points were gained on the weekend!