The Opinionated Gamers

Like yesterday, I’m having a great time being a tourist and seeing the sights.  As i mentioned earlier, started out Monday morning in the middle of a Monty Python skit – there must have been a church service in Cologne about every 5.2 minutes between the hours of 7am and 8am!

Since there was no sleeping in, I got up for a walk about the town. Unsurprisingly, not a lot goes on at 8am.  We did have a breakfast date scheduled with Jens-Peter Schliemann, so we headed back out in the drizzle to his design studio. We were treated to a full-on German breakfast filled with hard rolls, multiple cold cuts, poached eggs, horseradish spread for the rolls, etc.  I was introduced to a new food: some sort of aspic like meat, a clear jelly which had diced chicken and mandarin oranges suspended in it.

Can anyone identify this type of cold cut?

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Well, the fair hasn’t quite started, but I’ve managed to make it to Dusseldorf without any issues.  I’m glad that I made the flight changes with Delta – even with the extra 40 minutes or so that I had to argue for, I still barely made it to the gate on the connecting flight by the time boarding had started.  I think I would have been doomed had I kept the original flight that Delta had rescheduled for me.  No sleep on the plane, we were apparently watching a few exciting movies on board and there were a couple of folks on my plane who couldn’t help themselves from talking to the screen and making loud random outbursts that woke up everyone in the coach cabin.

So, I managed to get in a few more rulesets and read 2 and a half books on my Kindle. I arrived about three hours before my brother (my road trip buddy this year), and we had already planned to just go our separate ways and meet in Cologne at our hotel there. I figured that I could just get breakfast and walk around and enjoy the day.  That almost happened. I took the train to Cologne, and I was again blown away by the Cathedral being right outside the station.

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From Thurs 10-18 to Sun 10-28, the Opinionated Gamers will be covering the SPIEL fair from Essen, Germany.  A few of us will actually be at the fair, and others will contribute from home.  As with other special gaming occasions, we will eschew our usual limitation of one post per day and move to a more traditional blog format where any of our writers can contribute as the spirit moves them!

Well, here I am in the airport, sitting at my gate waiting to fly to Essen.  The last few days has been its usual frenzy as I’m struggling to get everything done for work, get all my stuff packed for Europe, catch up on writing for the blog, etc.  Delta threw me an interesting wrinkle yesterday… I had purchased my airfare almost 90 days agoas I saw a decent rate online at that time – and while I haven’t been super diligent at looking, my once-a-week check of fares has only found one week where the fare was lower, and only by $7.  In any event, I just got an email yesterday from Delta reminding me that my flight times had changed.  I didn’t remember any previous notification of the schedule change, and a quick search of my gmail also did not show a notification.  Nevertheless, my flight which was supposed to leave at 1245 had been shifted to 215.  At first, this seemed like a good thing because it would give me extra time in the morning to doublecheck my bags to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything.  However, when I looked a bit closer at my itinerary, I realized that I now only had a 49 minute layover in ATL.

That’s right. 49 Minutes in Atlanta. To leave my first plane (from row 28), get out to the terminal, transfer from Concourse A to C, find my new gate, try to upgrade my seat and then get on?  Oh, and the gates in ATL close 20 min prior to international flights, so that really is only 29 minutes.  And, that assumes that everything is running on time from Dayton, etc.  I didn’t think that would be enough time, so I clicked on the “Reschedule” link conveinently provided in the email, and I went to try to choose a different flight… There were a few available, including one from Cincinnati (I happen to live almost exactly between DAY and CVG), so I clicked the link.  Seats were available, and I clicked on the button to confirm the change.  And then – Delta.com asks me for an additional $1440.69 to process the seat change.  Huh?!  That’s almost double my original fare?!  A quick call to my helpful Delta Skymiles representative ended up getting me the flight change gratis, but it was a nervous hour spent on hold with multiple representatives trying to make sure that I could make my connection to Europe.  I’ve had to spend a night in the chairs at Hartsfield before, and that’s definitely not something that I am ever wanting to do again.  It also saved me from having to consider Delta’s backup plan in case I missed my flight to DUS.  Which would have been DAY-ATL-LGA-CDG-DUS.  Good for my Skymiles account, but about 3 transfers more than I’d like to deal with. Luckily, I got the last seat on the CVG-ATL leg, and now I get a generous 85 minutes to transfer.  Still a bit tight, but the weather looks good, and I’ve got my running shoes on.  I might even be able to hit the Chick-fil-A for lunch as I jog between gates!

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