Oh no. Not another Sean Norman travel story about flying home. I can hear your thought echo about it from here, but I just can’t help it. So if you’re new here, or really are having a horrendous morning and need to laugh at the misfortune of someone else, come on over and read forty-eight hours | the trip home from my attempt to make it home in one piece last summer. And this time, I thought I’d try it stand-by from the same part of the world.
It’s two days before my scheduled Lufthansa flights home to Vancouver from Tromsø. I’ve got a few hours to pass before I’m out the door for a night of chasing the northern lights with Kjetil, and isn’t it wise of me to log into our company site to check the flight loads coming home so I know I can count on there being space for me on my two Lufhthansa standby flights from Oslo-Frankfurt, and then Frankfurt-Vancouver.
Well, it depends how you look at it. The site displays the flight loads in three ways. A :-) for good space open, a :-| for fair space open, and a :-( for no space open. A week prior, both my flights were :-) and I was relaxed. Now I’m looking at the screen and all the faces are red :-(. Not only are they red :-(, but the first flight I was supposed to take is no longer even LISTED as a flight there. It’s been…cancelled? Destroyed? Demolished? Days before & after – same situation. Somethings up. Intuitively, I Google “Lufthansa strike?”. Yeeep. That intuition of mine is bang on again. Lufthansa pilots are to go on strike the 22nd. I’m listed to fly the 23rd. Have I mentioned I’m scheduled to be at work the 24th? No? Oh, I’m scheduled to work the afternoon of the 24th. Sweet.
Well, since I paid $160 for these two Lufthansa flights to get me from Oslo-Vancouver – it doesn’t feel very satisfying to be thinking about spending a few thousand dollars on a confirmed flight home all of a sudden. Oh, that’s right – The Olympics are happening in Vancouver right now, I wonder if I can even GET a flight there. My heart is in my throat. Thought: We get passes on Air Canada too. They fly into London’s Heathrow from Vancouver. Relief. Our pass office asks us to give them a minimum of two weeks to get us tickets for flying standby. I need these in less than 48 hours. In any case, I explain the situation to Carolyn at our pass office, and by the time I get home from just another extraordinary evening chasing the lights – she has me the Air Canada tickets I need. Heavenly. Well not quite.
I still have to call Air Canada myself and tell them exactly my date & time of hopeful travel. They don’t have a Norwegian phone number. It’s a 1-888 number. From Norway. Do you have any idea how spectacular the roaming charges would be to stay on hold with them for 20 minutes before I got a representative? I thought so. A few e-mails later, a friend back home has called for me and done everything that phone called needed to accomplish. Relief. Sort of. I book the flight from Tromsø-Oslo. $122. Now the search for a flight from Oslo-London. The cheapest that is coming up is $400. British Airways fares start at $1800. For a two hour flight, really? This leg previously was costing me $22. I settle on a fare with Norwegian.no for $270, except it’s the morning after I arrive into Oslo, and into London Gatwick, not Heathrow. I’ll sleep in the airport. I’ll find a way to get from Gatwick-Heathrow within three hours. Moving forward with the booking process on their website… Ohh, an additional $12 for a checked bag. Ahh, $7 for my seat reservation. Ohh, another $9 for… WANTING TO PAY WITH MY VISA?! You’re charging me for paying on your website to book my flight with YOUR airline with a credit card?! Whatever. Fine. It’s booked.
Wake up the next morning, I’m delighted to see an e-mail from Wideroe Airlines for my Tromsø-Oslo leg telling me my Visa card has been denied. That’s fantastic. Re-entre all the information. Double check it. Triple check it. Denied. E-mail from Norwegian.no for my Oslo-London leg. My credit card has not been authorized. I check my Hotmail, which I haven’t checked in weeks. Cue e-mail from my dad…
“You must call the VISA card centre immediately!!!! 1-800-361-0152
They believe the card has been breached with some really weird charges on it. The card has been cancelled.”
Dad, I’m in Norway with my mobile phone. There’s now way in hell I’m calling Canada on it from here to confirm my card has been cancelled. They can deal with it right now. I’m sort of having other issues.
Terrific news though. Do you believe in signs from the universe? I’m starting to.
At this point, I re-book my two flights with my other Visa. The one in my name I’ve only had for a month or two. The one with a resulting credit limit of $500 because it’s so new. The one I just charged a few thousand kroner worth of clothes from H&M on yesterday. That one. The first flight. Approved. Relief. I find myself at Norwegian.no, wondering if the extra $12 for a checked bag, or the extra $9 for paying WITH my Visa will put me over the edge of the limit and deny the entire thing all over again. No negative e-mails. Sweet.
The only other foreseeable problem ahead lies at Gatwick, where I’ll need to find $42 for my bus ticket to transfer to Heathrow airport. Please, please, please, Visa, have enough space left on you for this one last thing to get me home. S-u-c-c-e-s-s, that is how you spell success! Glad you picked up on that Simpsons line too :)
At this point, I’d like to mention how I would have just gone to an ATM in the centrum of Tromsø, and take out a few hundred dollars to pay for my flights AT the airport, and I did head to two different ATMs in the centrum to do just that… However, (Can you sense what’s coming?) it can’t be that simple.
I walk up. Card in. English selected as my language. 1900 Norwegian Kroner selected as my withdrawal amount (About $300 – my card limit per day is $400). “Your bank would not approve this transaction. Please take your card.”
Are you kidding me? Actually?
Card back in. English. Let’s try 1400 Kroner – just over $200. “Your bank would not approve this transaction. Please take your card.”
Card back in. English selected. 900 Kroner – $150. “Your bank would not approve this transaction. Please take your card.”
Sigh. I am amazing and travel the world. Remember I actually wanted to do this at one point, Sean?
English. 400 Kroner – $75. Spits out my money, and I realise – that was rather useless. $75 is not the $122 that my flight costs. Spectacular. I went chocolate shopping and kept 55 kroner for the airport bus later. Best decision so far, and thankfully, one of the last I had to make financially for a few days.
My flight from Tromsø arrived in Oslo just before 11p. Only 5 more hours before check-in opens for my flight to London at 6:25a the next morning. I’ll just find a decent bench/set of chairs/single chair somewhere with a plug for my laptop so I can relax, edit some photos and maybe even send off an e-mail or two before I get a few hours of sleep. The benches are harder than the floor. There are no chairs. And there are no plugs. Only cleaning machines spraying water all over the floor and then zooming ahead to dry it up. All. Night. Long. So I power up my Macbook, and my battery is flashing red at under 10%. I really would love to send an e-mail to Jen so I could humour her, and let her know I’m half well… Somehow I manage to frantically type type type type and steal a wifi signal that allows the e-mail to send. A small miracle.
Oslo Airport, why can’t you have free internet like Helsinki? I love Helsinki Airport. Not you, Oslo Airport. Do you really think I’m in a position to pay 150 Kroner ($25) for 24 hours of internet? Speaking of putting myself in a position of charging 150 Kroner to my Visa that is about to explode violently, I drag myself and my backpack to the 24 hour Cafe and gently ask the girl behind the counter for a chai latte & chocolate chip cookie. “Just… if you wouldn’t mind trying to charge my Visa first before you make the drink… it’s sort of a long story, and although I still have another 4 hours before I have to check-in… it may not be enough time to explain.”
And so there I was. Lying on the floor in Oslo Airport, spooning my backpack, breaking off pieces of my chocolate chip cookie to go with my chai latte in the first few hours of my 28 hour journey home to Vancouver.
Let me mention at this point, when I got home – one of my good friends at work who heard about the Lufthansa strike & knew I was supposed to be coming home on them greeted me at the airport and proceeded to inform me that they actually decided at the very last second not to go on strike after all. But what’s life without a little adventure right? Certainly not mine.
by Sean
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