My Saturday Porter Airlines flight from Vancouver to Toronto had a 07:00 departure, so Ted saw me off at the platform where I got on the morning’s very first SkyTrain to the airport at 5:00 a.m., looking forward to breakfast and a nap on the 4-1/2 hour flight.
The west-to-east time zone changes meant that it was just past 2:00 p.m. when I arrived in Toronto, and almost … by the time I collected my suitcase, found the hotel shuttle, and got checked into the Element by Marriott.
The hotel shares an on-site restaurant called Moments with the adjacent Four Points Sheraton, so I didn’t need to leave the building to grab a light dinner. That said, there was also a PizzaWay just a 5 minute walk along Airport Road in the Quality Inn that also Southeast Asian take-out options, so I ended up with an unattractive but delicious chicken curry with naan, and a scoop of ice cream .
It was the next morning that things started to go wrong.
It probably wasn’t a good sign that the fire alarm went off in the hotel in which I was staying at 7 am, even though it was a false alarm.
It delayed breakfast a bit, but that was perfectly okay.
Son #1 and his partners met me at the hotel. The original plan was for Sunday lunch and then using the complimentary shuttle to get us to the airport by 3:00 p.m. for our 6:20 p.m. Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt, but apparently it was “uniform day” because although the firefighters had all left, as #1 and their family were arriving the main floor public areas were evacuated for a police call.
With no idea how long we’d be standing on the curb, we headed to Zed’s Shawarma for lunch, and then – with no access as hotel guests (I’d checked out already) to the shuttle, my daughter-in-law dropped us at the terminal. We were far earlier than intended, but our gate was empty so we just sat and got caught up.
Still, nothing to get stressed about.
I had booked us exit row seats on the plane.
The upside to that was lots of legroom. The downside was that we were right by the washrooms, which meant lots of passenger traffic. We really didn’t get to sleep at all.
Still, that’s economy class flying.
Where things really started to go wrong was once we reached Frankfurt.
After a fairly uneventful flight and some quite decent food on Lufthansa,
we arrived in Frankfurt on time , and were amused by who was waiting for us.
Out positive feeling evaporated as we ended up standing for over 2 1/2 hours in the border control area. What started out as fairly orderly lines, although they had no line delineation marked, turned into bedlam when one of the airport staff suggested everyone simply bunch up. That meant that those of us who had already been standing for 90 minutes suddenly ended up behind people who were just arriving on planes. Folks were really unhappy. At one point, a gentleman yelled really loudly “hurry up” and several people started chanting in unison and with him; the result of that was that two armed policemen appeared in the hall and took over letting people go through border control roughly 15 at a time. In the end, we were there almost 3 hours.
Standing there for that long makes it even more upsetting that I didn’t notice that I didn’t have my shoulder bag. I had hung it up in the bathroom stall after we got off the plane completely exhausted, and walked away without it. I didn’t notice until we were on the train to Cologne. Since we were on an express intercity train that travels at speeds of around 250kph/255 mph, direct, there was no way to get off before Cologne. I used the Find My application on my phone to verify that the iPad was still at the airport. We did a quick check into our hotel, turned around and got back on the train for the hour ride back to the airport; this was becoming a really expensive excursion.
Son#1 joked “well, you said we’d see Germany by train”.
When we got to the airport in Frankfurt, Find My was showing that my iPad had now moved to Frankfurt’s main train station, so we got on the Sbahn and went there. From there the iPad continued to move, and we wandered around following the blip for the iPhone until we reached a street that was very analogous to East Hastings in Vancouver, in that all the denizens of the street were homeless and shooting up. There was certainly no way that we were going to ask any of them if they had my iPad even though the Find My app seemed to show that we were right on top of it. It took some walking around to find a policeman in one of the police vans and I flagged him down, but he was already occupied going off to do something and suggested that we walk to the police station about 10 minutes away and report what we knew about where the iPad was.
At the police station our information was taken and two police officers invited us to join them in the back of a police van )with blacked out windows to protect our identities) to go to the street where the iPad had last been seen. By then, of course, it was on the move again – maybe because #1 and I had walked along the street, obviously not belonging there, and had spooked whoever had it. At any rate, it seemed to be back in the main train station again. The two policeman with us were joined by six others, so we now had eight policeman on foot using my phone’s Find My feature to try to find the iPad. At times it seemed as if we were right on top of it, but still couldn’t find it, and unfortunately, the pinging sound that it is supposed to make did not work. In the end, it was determined that the only thing I could do was file a report, but the officers agreed that there was really there was very little hope that I was ever getting the iPad back.
My beautiful blue tote bag that the iPad was in, along with shoes, toiletries, makeup, medication, charging cords, plug adapters, a scarf, and my all important trip journal listing all the things we were going to do plus our train schedules and our event tickets, is also gone. It’s likely that the bag was deemed worthless and simply thrown away once the iPad was taken, although I filed the lost luggage report at the airport, and there is some possibility that it may have been left behind once the iPad was taken. Nonetheless, we’re not going to be back in Frankfurt until the very last day of our three week trip and by then my journal and the other things in that bag won’t be of use anymore.
To top things off, our train back to Cologne from Frankfurt was cancelled, so we ran for one of the offered alternatives, which the Deutsche Bahn app makes easy to find.
Turns out we wouldn’t have needed to run, because the alternative we chose deleted our Cologne stop, and our second choice was running 15 minutes late.
First priority back in Cologne: toothpaste, toothbrush, deodorant, skin cream, mascara, tweezers, comb, charging cable (that last one will have to be tomorrow)
Second: food and a cold beer, followed by showers and an early night.
Honestly, it was the worst travel day I’ve ever had. We spent no time wandering around Cologne on a beautiful sunny afternoon and instead spent a ridiculous amount on same-day train tickets, saw the seedy side of Frankfurt, and ended up (despite being really impressed by some very caring police) discouraged at the lack of decency of someone who would find a traveller’s bag and steal from it instead of turning it in.
Blogs? This one was put together on my phone, but it is incredibly awkward to do, so there may not be any unless I can create them retroactively after we get back, on a new iPad.
It certainly wasn’t the start to our trip that I wanted to give our son.
We somewhat made up for it by eating schnitzel and bratwurst and drinking Kölsch at Peter’s Brauhaus.
And we did get a gorgeous view of the Dom at twilight when we finally got a chance to slow down and breathe..
Rose and Ted’s Excellent Adventure 
Oh, Rose! How terrible — especially the realization that the right and decent thing to do wasn’t done when the bag was found. I think that was really bad luck — most people are good and decent. That most tired moment after a flight is such a risky time. We were badly scammed in Santiago due to terribly slow immigration lines causing us to miss our reserved ride and end up with fake airport taxis. The bank made it right in the end but it damaged our perception of humanity for a little while. We also check each other all the time for # of bags, passports back from officials, etc. The good news story from a recent trip was a baggage agent in Heathrow realizing that one of our self checked bags hadn’t gone through the scanner correctly and would have been left behind if it weren’t for that agent chasing us down through the airport — all the way to the gate area, where we were in a cafe having lunch. She took us back behind the scenes all the way to baggage to correct it, then all the way back to the gate, helping us bypass security the second time. Amazing kindness.
I hope the rest of the trip goes smoothly — you’ve had your bad luck for a while.
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Oh, Rose! Reading this makes want to cry for you. That heart-sinking feeling when you realize you’ve left something important behind. Worse than having it stolen from you, because you just want to die on the spot. In the end, it’s just things (expensive things, but things). I’ll bet if you had located your iPad you would have given the thief a piece of your mind (in German), after alerting the police, of course.
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