(insert bad words here)

Okay - so who did I piss off?

So I take the morning and sleep in a little, since I didn't sleep the night before. I went and visited the Mall of America - and promptly got lost. Well, I figured that an hour there was enough, and so I went to the airport to check in. Where we last left off, it was because of the mechanical and weather delays, I was to go through to Brussels, then catch a flight on Ethiad Airways (the official carrier of the UAE) into Abu Dhabi.

Well upon showing up and presenting my case to the ticket agent, he looked - and Ethiad had cancelled my reservation because NorthWest failed to correspond with them and tell them my eTicket number! Apparently they tried to contact NorthWest a couple of times (thank the Gods all of this is documented in the ticket!!!) but nobody gave them the number, so they felt it best to cancel my ticket.

*sigh*

So, we're standing there and I'm calmly telling him that I *HAVE* to get to Abu Dhabi sometime, when he notices that there's a flight out of Amsterdam direct to Abu Dhabi with 5 seats on it. The problem? Some overseas and then subsequent overland tickets cannot be purchased separately. It took them 45 minutes to get me on the flight to Amsterdam (that I was already on, mind you) AND to let me on the flight to Abu Dhabi!

So there we have it. I'm sitting at MSP, waiting for my flight. I hope - HOPE - to be in Abu Dhabi by tomorrow night at 9:45PM, but at this point I'm not holding my breath. Maybe they have some good beer here...