way out there and back again, a bag's tale

[anotheranon]

I finally got my suitcase back yesterday morning. Given that we flew back in late Friday/early Saturday, this was incredibly inconvenient. Very fortunately everything was present and intact, with only a travel-size lotion bottle breaking in transit.

Somehow the bag ended up on an international flight(?! No one at the airline could figure how this happened. Perhaps bags like London this time of year?) and came back from London via Detroit on Monday afternoon. Evidently even a quick connecting flight doesn't speed things up because it's a given that any unaccompanied luggage from outside the US takes 4-6 hours to clear customs.

As I type this I'm still doing laundry :/ Silly (?) me packed all of my nicest casual clothes because we were seeing family and so I wanted to look tidier than my usual after-hours sweatpants, but that meant that had the bag been lost I would have had to replace most of my jeans, best bras, and 2 very nice cashmere sweaters I received as gifts :(

If nothing else, I've learned not to pack everything for a trip no matter how nice I have to look or how long I'll be away - 1 week's worth, no more, carryon forever!

On the upside, erring on the side of caution meant I did have my snow boots and ski bib available when the snow hit the ground and we ended up hitting the slopes - something I hope to find time to post about over the weekend.

Comments

[jlsjlsjls.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear the prodigal bag has finally arrived and hope the lotion didn't get on anything it can't easily be washed out of. Très weird about it managing to get itself loaded onto an international flight, especially since in most places that means going to a separate terminal (up here, anyway) ... I would imagine the baggage handlers who unloaded it from your plane were sorting by local/national transfer/international transfer and dealt it into the wrong pile (the downside of the new container-style baggage systems is that handlers can no longer do a last-minute visual tag check as luggage enters a new plane)

P.S. Jeans and sweaters, while a pain to do it, are simple enough to replace, but losing good bras would have been truly catastrophic!

[semmie17.livejournal.com]

When I came back from Paris, after having to deal with broken airplanes, missed connecting flights, and barely caught flights -- my luggage didn't make it on the last flight to Aberdeen. They apologized at the terminal, but at that point I was all "I don't fuking care, I just wanna go home!"

It arrived the next day. Tsh. You never know what luggage gets up to when you're not looking....