Airport Drama - Part II

In my previous post, I started to describe our airport drama. Here's what happened next...

I grab my wallet and go on a crazy hunt for a luggage store as Mr. Milk and the lady try to sort things out.

I asked the first person I ran into if they knew if and where there was a luggage store. Sure they said. Downstairs. So we run downstairs (me and one of our friends) only to find the luggage conveyor belts. We look to the left and see a luggage storAGE place. Obviously I needed to be clearer. So we run back upstairs and go into the international terminal. We look around but nothing. We ask someone else, they tell us we passed it on the left. We were clearly looking and would have pounced on the darned store if we had seen it! We start to walk back and finally see an information booth with a lady who knew what she was talking about.  All along the store was right next to us in the domestic terminal! We get to the only luggage store in the whole damn airport and start looking for a suitcase like crazy people. Lifting them up, looking at size and price. I can hear our friend yelling prices out, all ridiculously pricey. I think we found the only suitcase in the store that was less than $100! The salesperson clips off the tag and our friend runs it over to the counter while I pay.

It then became a mad rush of unlocking all the suitcases and unpacking enough items from each to balance out. Mr. Milk was thankfully still allowed 32kg, which we would have to pay $225 for. We were already paying an extra $50 for my second one at only 23 kg. But there was noting else to do. Our friend placed each suitcase on the scale and took out enough items to pass over to me to place in the new suitcase. We came out at exactly the maximum weight for each piece! I can't even explain to you how grateful I was at the time. While I would love to break that damn scale over Mr. Milk's head, I will refrain from doing so, and instead track down the manufacturer and write a very very pissed off letter of complaint! In my fantasy world, they give us back the $225 for the extra weight and $85 for the new suitcase! We knew we had extra weight and that's why we shipped 3 other items a few days before with air freight! If the scale had been accurate, we would have just sent more items that day since it was so much more cheaper than doing it this way. Oh well. What's done is done...

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But I'd be lying if I didn't tell you that i had a suspicion that our bags were too heavy. I've flown enough to have a sense of what 23kg feels like. While I'm no body builder by any means, I can typically lift a 23kg suitcase with one arm with mild - moderate difficulty. I needed both hands to lift these up and that was with considerable effort! I should have said something. We'd sold our regular scale, so I'm not sure what we would have done, but worst case scenario, we would have bought one and returned it. Better safe than sorry right... But alls well that ends well.

We also realized that we had less than an hour to make our connection in calgary. As if this wasn't stressful enough, we were told that it was snowing in Calgary! It's almost June for crying out loud! If there were any kind of delays we would miss our connection for sure. Luckily everything went smoothly after this and not only did we make our connection, but we made it home safe and sound, with all our gazillion pieces of luggage!