Just a little bit early….

On the 20th of January we arrived at the airport Schiphol at 07.30h, our flight would leave at 10.10. We went to check in and handed in our cargo luggage. We received two tickets with barcodes on them and walked towards the entrance to go to the gates. At the entrance we scanned the tickets so the fence would open. Only it didn’t, the system gave an error. The assistant didn’t know what was wrong either and send us to another desk, who send us to another entrance to the gate, where the tickets didn’t work either. But here the assistant noticed the dates on our tickets, the dates said the 21st. instead of the 20th. We assumed this was an error and went back to the check in. By now we were a little bit stressed and worried about our cargo luggage, what date would be on the luggage? When the woman checked the system she said the tickets were correct!? We showed her our booking on the phone which definitely said the 20th, or so we thought…

When we booked our flight, for some reason it was cheaper to book a ticket where we would start at Antwerp station and take the train to Schiphol, than to book a ticket without the train. Not very logical but ok. Naturally we didn’t go to Antwerp first, we just skipped the train. A friend kindly took us to the airport. What we had failed to notice (in our defence; we had a lot of organizing and different bookings to deal with) was that the train would leave on the 20th and our flight on the 21st…. Oh man, did we feel stupid! So here we were a whole day early! With Binkie stuffed in his small bag, 2 pieces of carry on luggage and the rest of our luggage already heading for the cargo area… The woman at the check in advised us to go to the ticket office, perhaps they could change our tickets. 

With little hope and feeling quite hot from the stress, we headed to the ticket office. Meanwhile I was already thinking about having to book a hotel, buying toothbrushes and finding an emergency litter box for Binkie. At the ticket office we explained our problem. She checked and YES, there were still some empty seats, even for the same price! Our problem wasn’t quite solved yet as she also had to check that Binkie could come with us on this flight, as there are only a few pets in cabin allowed on each flight. While she made the phone call I was silently begging for this to be ok too. My begging worked because Binkie could come, so we didn’t have to wait until the next day before flying. To say we were relieved would be an understatement. We even had a seat next to a window and next to each other, of course we would have accepted any seat by now.  We thanked her profusely and finally headed for the gate. This time the fence did open. We were very relieved but also laughing at ourselves for making such a dumb mistake. Kilian checked online to see where our seats would be in the airplane and we got a nice surprise; we were now seated in economy plus instead of economy. So we had gotten a free upgrade as well! 

The rest of the flight went well and all our luggage arrived with us in Cancún.