YEAH!

Thanks for the entertainment!!!!!

And since you seem to fly out of my airport. If you ever see a short blond woman with a HOT PINK Vitronox 22" rollerboard, say HI!

Is it really over? I keep waiting for yet another twist ;)

I really take for granted the fact that we have a passport agency in LA which I and other family members have had to use on occasion.

Yes, it's really over.

You are indeed very fortunate to live in a place where you've got a passport agency, Patty. Seems like Atlanta deserves one: six million people and home to the world's busiest airport. It's almost as if the government's overlooking the entire southeast U.S.

Our arrival in Amsterdam, week on holiday there, and flight home to Atlanta were all very pleasant.

No recent travel to Europe, but I did have another potential close call connection-wise a couple of weeks ago that I'll relate in the interest of encouraging the rest of you to share.

This trip did not involve a non-protected connection between flights, but another sort that comes up pretty frequently on the forum: connecting to a land or sea tour. Unlike non-protected air connections, where you are likely to be able to get to your destination in the end, albeit with potential financial penalty, this sort of misssed connection can be expensive and also result in your missing the trip entirely, as they're may be no way of "catching up" with your group once it's started.

The trip was a week of whitewater rafting in a wilderness area of Idaho, the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. Apart from the official put in and take out points, and a few private airstrips along the way, there's no way to access the river (well, apart from hiking in, I suppose). The trip commenced early Saturday AM, and I couldn't leave Atlanta until Friday afternoon, as I had no more holidays for the year. So the only way for me to go on this trip was to fly from ATL to BOI Friday night, and then rent a car and drive another three hours Stanley, ID.

In order to do this I had to get special permission from the owners of the tour company, as it meant that I'd be missing the orientation on Friday afternoon (not that big a deal, as the orientation is largely meant for people who haven't the faintest clue what they're about, I gather) and was running the very possible risk that I'd miss the trip entirely (at a cost of $2,000 + travel). No refunds, no exceptions.

My husband and son had traveled, along with several other families in our party, the previous evening, and their flight had been delayed over an hour. They'd spent the night in Boise, and then traveled on to Stanley on Friday AM.

And it was Friday AM when my husband called me at work in Atlanta to tell me that he'd decided to stay in Boise and wait for me, so that he could drive the car (instead of a very tired and somewhat jetlagged me doing the driving).

This turned out to be a very, very good idea, as my flight was also delayed a bit, and by the time we got all the way to Stanley, over a very twisty mountain road, it was 1:00 AM in Idaho (and 3:00 AM in my body).

Up at 6:00 to pack and meet the river guide for our mini-orientation. Everything went smoothly, and the trip was fantastic.

Okay, any more stories out there? Good or bad.