This was just a long travel day. Our flight from Croatia didn’t leave until 12:50, so we had plenty of time to get up, shower, pack, grab some breakfast, and head to the airport plenty early.
Both of our connections were scheduled to be pretty reasonable—long enough to have a little cushion in them, but not so long as to have us sitting in the airport for hours. As it turned out, we were delayed getting out of Croatia and then had a long walk to our gate in Amsterdam. So, we had time to go to the restroom before they started boarding, but that was about it. But…then the boarding took an eternity, which put a major delay on the Amsterdam departure. That then had us deplaning at JFK with an hour to go to catch our flight to Columbus. Julie had given us a tip to get the mobile entry app, which got us into a shorter line for customs…but the delayed arrival meant we hit that line right at 8:00 PM…which was a shift change for the border control agents. The shift change, apparently, means…pretty much no one is processed at all for a 10-minute stretch. We got through that, grabbed and dropped off our checked bags, and then had a train ride and running up and down stairs to get to security for the Columbus flight…where the TSAPre line was closed. It seemed fine, since there were only 5 or 6 people in the line in front of us. But there were apparently a few people who had never experienced air travel (we can only assume!), and a single TSA agent working the line. Still, we made it to the gate 25 minutes before the scheduled departure…only to find closed doors because the flight crew had not yet arrived. Once the crew arrived, they hustled us onto the plane, which would have gotten things to a pretty close-to-the-scheduled takeoff, but then we sat for another 45 minutes waiting for the tarmac to clear to allow for a pushback!
We landed in Columbus a bit before midnight, which meant it was every bit the long day we had expected it to be, but we managed to catch every flight in the plan and get back essentially as scheduled!
An interesting/memorable experience of the day:
Benton: getting busted at security in Croatia (which was super casual otherwise) for having a knife in my carry-on. I had no idea what that was, and it took some digging to find it, even while looking at the X-ray. It turned out…it was the butter knife from the set we’d purchased in Ireland to have for spreading peanut butter on bread when hiking. We’d both totally forgotten about it. Both the security agent and Dad were amused.
Tim: The comically slow boarding process in Amsterdam. It took well over an hour, and something went awry in the process mid-way through. We boarded almost dead last (because…why sit on the plane? We had nothing for the overhead bins), so we got to witness the process, including being pulled over for the explosives screening because “everyone coming from Croatia has to get that screening done” (see Benton’s note about the casual screening process in Croatia!