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David and I stood and watched with dismay as the last of the passengers on our flight snatched the last bag off the conveyor belt at the airport in Lima. One more empty turn around the carousel and it was official our little red bag had taken a vacation of its own.
Earlier in the day, David and I had sat in an airport coffee shop in Miami across from the LAN check in desk waiting for it to open so we could check our bag and head off to the terminal for our flight to Lima. Since we were several hours early for our flight, we weren’t distressed when the check in counter didn’t open for an hour or so. We sat idly, drinking coffee, munching on a blueberry muffin and checking our emails on our travel computers.
Finally we realized the counter would open in a few minutes so we made our way to the check-in line. There were a dozen or so early birds that had lined up before us but even this was no worry because our flight didn’t depart for hours so we had plenty of time to spare. Unfortunately, there was only one person working the check-in so a line of a dozen people or so was moving at a snail’s pace. Finally after almost an hour of patiently standing in line it was our turn. We went up to the check-in girl, handed her our sheet of paper indicating the LAN flight we were booked on. She looked at the paper, clicked a few keys on her computer then politely informed us that the flight we were on was an LAN flight but it was being operated by American Airlines and we would have to make the trek back across the airport to the terminal that we had arrived at several hours ago to check in there.
Needless to say, I was less than pleased with my absolutely wonderful yet sometimes absentminded husband who had assured me repeatedly that he looked at the confirmation and that LAN was indeed the correct place to check in. Since the walk from where we were to where we had been and now needed to return to was basically miles in airport footage, I had lots of time to get over myself before we arrived at the correct check-in area and once again join the line of passengers that had gotten there before us.
The next day when we returned from our tour of Lima we were elated to see our wayward little red bag sitting in our hotel room. As we walked up to it we realized that it had a red LAN flight sticker on it not an American Airlines sticker. If the airlines themselves were confused on who was operating the flight, then there was no way an attorney from Murfreesboro could be held accountable for misinterpreting the flight data. David was jubilantly vindicated!
