Months of planning and one hour before we are supposed to leave I realized that our stuff won't fit in the suitcases we have planned to use. I panicked. Josie remained calm and later confessed that she had to restrain herself from laughing out loud at me. Not one of my better moments! I decided to throw all of the extra stuff into an extra suitcase resulting in absolutely chaotic packing. In my efforts to reduce our load to fit in two suitcases, I had extracted random things to leave behind at my mom's house. Now, I have no idea what I left and what I brought. I guess I'll find out in a few hours when we arrive at our apartment in Aix.
I must clarify...Josie was perfectly organized, packed and ready to leave with one check-in bag weighing in under 50 pounds and her two carry-ons. The problem was all mine!
The night before, I had tried to check-in for our flights on-line, but the website wouldn't allow me to check-in. On the drive to the airport Gary joked that maybe we didn't really have tickets. Oh dear...if I only knew how close he was to the truth! When we arrived at DIA, the gate agent at British Airways couldn't check us in either and couldn't figure out what the problem was. Eventually, several phone calls later, they discerned that our ticket had never been ticketed...it was booked and we had seats, but they had never charged my credit card!! We stood at the ticket counter for nearly an hour before they finally got it sorted out. The cause was that the time for our return flight was changed (by only 5 minutes) just after I booked the reservation, and the computer system got stuck. Because I didn't authorize the change, it never ticketed our ticket, but thankfully the system retained our booking and seats and the orginal price.
The wonderful result was that they were very apologetic and didn't charge me for the extra suitcase! A silver lining to our ticket snafu.
Having successfully flown across the Atlantic and transferred from Heathrow to Gatwick airports in London, we are safely on our way to Marseille!
