For over a year, my daughter and I have been planning a trip to Italy. Since I’m retired, the timing wasn’t much of an issue for me, but my daughter is a different story. She is a teacher, so we pretty much had to limit it to summer. She also usually teaches a summer school session, so we had to keep that in mind. Then there’s her boys with their busy, busy lives. Her youngest plays on a travel baseball team which takes up many of their summer weekends. I scoured the trips for one that would meet our timeline and finalized it in December to take advantage of “early bird” rates. Now our trip is only weeks away!

Last night I got a call from the travel agent. The airlines cancelled one of our return flights! My heart just sank. It means we would miss our connection in Chicago. She wasn’t clear on just what the problem was, or the proposed solution. She sent me the old itinerary for the flights and the new. What it comes down to is spending an entire day in Frankfurt, Germany and coming home a day later. They will pick up the hotel fee and maybe give us some vouchers for food.

I tried to convince them to look for an alternative route to get us home as planned, but nothing worked. We even offered to drive a rental back from Chicago, but they wouldn’t pick up the tab for that. So, looks like we will be even more international than we thought. Wish us luck–Danke!