TRAVEL DAY TO BUDAPEST

Budapest 

I must say, this has been an interesting day.  Yesterday,  Saturday, September 5, we we left Sacramento to go to San Francisco to stay overnight for our 2 pm flight Sunday for Frankfurt with connections to Budapest.  

All went well until about 40 minutes into the flight when one of the engines quit.this is a big plane with four engines, so it wasn't particularly scary, but it took quite a long time to dump all the fuel and kill all the fish before we could land back at SFO.

 Believe it or not, they actually were able to put us on another plane and 5 hours after our original departure, we were in the air again.  

Then about the time we'd been in the air for bout two hours, they asked if there was a doctor on board.  I was  picturing a landing somewhere in Canada, but that must have been resolved.  

As I write this, it is 4:30 am at home, 1:30 at our destination,, we have missed our connecting flight to Budapest and may or may not have been rebooked.  And we are still an hour and a half from Frankfurt.  I slept about 3-1/2 hours, though.

Our passage through Frankfurt airport was hilarious. The classic wait and hurry up.  

Zoe gets a wheelchair. The airport because she doesn't have the strength or speed to manipulate a big airport in a short amount of time.  

So, we get off the plane where we are supposed to meet by a United agent telling us when our shiny new connections will be departing -- all this stuff the busy worker bees were allegedly reconstructing while we were on the plane.  

Except because zoe gets a wheelchair, we were herded into a corralled area for the wheelchair passengers and the agent tells us that our new flight is in an hour and we will have plenty of time.  Maybe something about "plenty" suffers in translation.  We waited.  And waited.  Then I became concerned that while they might have taken care of her, they had never asked for my name, and we did t book our reservations together, so they might not have us traveling together and maybe I would arrive at the gate with no boarding pass.  

I walked across the terminal and found most of my fellow passengers who had allegedly been helped by United waiting in a looooong line to get boarding passes -- which you need to go through immigration.  Now I can see that I am not going to get through this line in anything under an hour, and I know already that our plane is at gate A 52 and we are at a gate that starts with a Z!  

About this time, a wheelchair driver shows up and starts us to immigration, where we get pretty much waved through, and then on what I can only describe as an attempt at an 8-minute mile.  

I'm still wearing a blanket from the plane because it's cold and because it's about 4 a.m. to me, which is the time of day when I am the coldest, though not today, because we are on a very long sprint.  I am gasping for air trying to keep up with her, and she is doing a very fast walk with a few running steps every so often.  Were it not for the moving sidewalks, I would have died for lack of breath, really, by the time we got there.  We were the last two people on the plane, and even so, zoe got an aisle seat.  

Dumping fuel over the ocean