No Use Crying Over Missed Connections

So, my mom's birthday (a big one that she'd kill me if I disclosed) is on July 13 and to celebrate, my sister Tara and her fiance Justin are coming to Cairo. They were booking their flight this morning (Cairo time) and this reminded me of one more thing that I should have done, but didn't. I should have made sure that I had more than 50 minutes between connections. The plane that was supposed to be my connecting flight from Minneapolis to Amsterdam left at exactly the time when the flight I took from Austin finally landed late in Minneapolis. The exact same time. I realize that a few hundred other people missed their connections due to forces out of all of our control, but still, if I'd had more than 50 minutes, I would have made it. And the thing is, after I realized that I had such a short layover (which was a few weeks before my flight), I knew this might happen.

I mean, this particular missed flight was caused by a storm, but really, flights run late pretty damn often enough. It's not uncommon for a flight to take off 30 minutes late. Sometimes they make up the time in the air, but if there are delays at the airport they're flying into, it really doesn't matter. And 50 minutes is nothing anyway. Once you land, taxi through the runway, get to the arrival gate and actually get out of the plane, you've got 35 minutes max. If you're on time in the first place. And what if you forgot to get something. Like, say, gum...

So, anyway, I have decided to file this away in the airplane tab hanging in the travel planning filing cabinet in my head (yeah, I said it...): An hour and a half to two hours minimum for all flight connections. And that's it. Otherwise, sooner or later, I'll end up back at the Ramada Inn Mall of America in Minneapolis for the so-called "reduced rate" of $69 ($80 with tax) with nothing but a Sky Team T-shirt to sleep in, a travel toothbrush and some weird travel deodorant that came in the overnight kit I had to charm a Northwest Airlines employee into giving me. And as much of an adventure as it was; I'm good with the one experience I had. So there it is, nothing really big to bitch about, just something else one would think that my travel agent should have thought about. Maybe he did and that was the best option there was. But, oh well, I got here. Only an entire day late without one of my suitcases. But that's another story...