I remembered!!

In reference to my last entry, you will be pleased that I remembered what I was going to write. Actually, you may be a little disappointed, but I don't care.

I got an e-mail from my friends Bryan and Ryan who are currently in Europe. Well, they just arrived. The plan was to fly into London, spend the day there and hop on a bus late at night for a trip to Scotland and tour the land of Scot for a few days.

So I got an e-mail from then saying that clearly I am not praying hard enough for them. Why? Because they got to London alright, but what was left behind was Ryan's bag. Now that's a downer. Go to Europe for seven weeks and they loose your bag containing everything you need.

Alas....

They said that the airline would make sure that Ryan's bag would arrive in Scotland somehow for Ryan to pick up.

I am honestly amazed at the ability for an airline to get your luggage to you after they loose it on a huge flight. How is a bag going to get to Scotland for Ryan? But it will.

My greatest experience with mystery bag placement would be when I went to Argentina. It is a surprisingly long trip to get to Argentina. I started my journey in Edmonton, flew to Toronto, flew to Chicago, flew to Atlanta, flew to Sao Paulo, flew to Buenos Aires and finally to Cordoba in Argentina. That took a long time.

Half way we got stranded too! Lo and behold when we reached Sao Paulo we were informed that our ticketed itinerary simply did not exist. Strange, seeing as we had the tickets in our hands.

So what does one do in this case? We are in Brazil, which is clearly not the right country to be in. We still have to make it to Argentina somehow. Luckily we had a fluent Spanish speaker on our team. Sadly, the language of Brazil is Portuguese. But they are similar enough that our Spanish speaker was able to work things out with a Portuguese speaking agent.

We got put on a sweeeeeet flight from Sao Paulo to Buenos Aires (1st Class, which was a step up from Business class on this plane) and once we reached Buenos Aires we had to drive across one of the largest cities in the world, get into another airport, get checked in and on the next plane all in 15 minutes.

WHAT???!!?!?!

Luckily we caught that and fixed things so that we had a few hours. Varig Airlines even arranged a taxi van to pick us up and drive us to the airport in BA. That was cool.

An added twist to the story is that my ticket was the only one that carried on the original itinerary for our group, so Randy Clark was somehow able to use it for the remainder of the trip and get to Cordoba on time to speak at the first massive revival meeting we were scheduled to be in.

Did I mention yet, that when I reached Toronto and crossed customs, my luggage didn't join me? They had no idea where it was.

So now I'm in Sao Paulo with no luggage and our flight doesn't exist. My ticket has been switched for Randy to use. We are being re-routed on a completely different airline through a brand new route and to airports we were never supposed to go through in the first place. If you notice your luggage tickets you'll see that they are paired with certain flights and they go through an incredible underground computer system making sure that they get to the correct flight in most cases. Either that, or they are taken by hand to the proper flight, but when your luggage misses that...

I wasn't the only one with no bags, either.

So we eventually get to Cordoba with the promise that our luggage will be there. Of course, mine isn't there and this other guy named Steve doesn't have any. What are we supposed to do? We were planning on buying new stuff because we honestly thought there is no possible way for luggage that was lost a loooong time ago to somehow find us in Cordoba, after our original tickets and routing was apparently non-existent.

But wouldn't you know it? Two days later it did! Although Steve was pretty worried because when we picked up our bags a security guy opened mine up and checked the whole thing. Steve smokes a pipe and had a large brick of tobacco, which looked a lot like something else. Since we don't speak Spanish how would Steve possibly explain this to the security guy? But apparently Mr. Security man was happy with what he saw in mine and let us go.

We were happy to have clothes back because we were going on our fourth day in the same clothes and it was hot and humid to say the least!!

All that to say, I'm amazed Ryan's bag will join him in Scotland. As annoying as it is to have an airline loose your bags, it's really amazing the lengths they will go to return one piece of luggage to one guy when they are flying millions around the world everyday.

Next I may tell you about our Russia fiasco and almost getting arrested at the border! That was fun... I never ran so fast in my life. Yes... I may tell you that one later.