Everything That Could Go Wrong: Our Race to the Danube

This is Part 1 of a three-part series on our Danube river cruise. Part 2, Down the Danube, follows the ship through eight countries, and Part 3, On Our Own in Bucharest, covers our days off the boat.

This was one of the most difficult journeys I’ve ever taken, and it started before we ever left the ground. Skye and I checked out of our hotel on Friday, March 6, and by the time we reached the airport we already knew our flight was delayed. Chicago was getting hammered by severe thunderstorms that had grounded planes and set off a chain reaction of delays and cancellations across the country. All I could think about was our connection in Chicago to Munich, and whether we’d make it.

The gate agent gave me a choice, and then gently told me which one to pick. We could rebook for the next day, but she said the next day’s travel was predicted to be even worse, and that we should try to get ourselves to Chicago tonight no matter what. She handed me a hotel voucher for Chicago in case we didn’t make the connection, and told us to run for it. In the end we walked onto an earlier Chicago flight that had itself been delayed seven hours. Skye and I were the very last two they let on from standby, and they shut the gate door behind us with a big, final slam. I could see our checked bag get loaded, and it landed in Chicago right along with us. And then it left to go on its own private tour of Europe, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

We made it to Chicago with time to catch the Munich flight. We really did. Then our plane pushed back and sat on the runway for so long that we missed it anyway, because there was no open gate for us to pull into. Our flight to Munich left without us, and then, in the cruelest possible twist, the gate it vacated was the one our plane finally rolled into. I watched the irony happen in real time.

What followed was the runaround. Lufthansa said it was United’s fault for getting us in late, United said Lufthansa was responsible for rebooking, and Skye and I stood in the middle of it with our carry-ons. United eventually rebooked us and assured me, more than once, that my checked bag would follow us to Munich the next day and there was nothing I needed to do about it. We took the shuttle to a nearby Hilton, spent the night, checked out at the last possible minute, and spent the whole next afternoon camped at the airport waiting on a 6 p.m. flight to Munich. Twice more I asked about the bag. Twice more I was told it would follow us.

It did not follow us

We landed in Munich and there was no bag. Two hours after we got off the plane, we finally reached a Lufthansa agent who could talk to us about it. She couldn’t find it in the system at all, and opened a lost baggage claim. Cody, back home, spent several hours on the phone with United and was told it would be on that night’s flight and arrive the next day.

So we improvised. For the next several days we used the little toiletry kits the airline and hotel gave us, wore cheap clothes we bought in Germany, and did our best to enjoy ourselves anyway. I did not anticipate how genuinely gross my own face would feel without my usual products. I’ll spare you most of the details, except to say I had a dream so vivid about my clogged pores that I woke up disturbed by it. Five days without your own things does strange things to a person.

Here’s where the trip was supposed to begin gently: two nights in Munich’s Old Town to sleep off the time difference and wander the city before boarding. Instead the delays ate our first night entirely, and we canceled the second on purpose to sleep near the train station and make our early connection. So our first real taste of vacation wasn’t Munich at all. It was the train pulling into Vilshofen, and the short walk to the ship, and the enormous relief of finally, finally arriving at the thing we’d traveled so hard to reach.

The reunion

Our bag caught up with us on Wednesday, at the ship’s second stop, in Linz. I felt a rush of relief and gratitude when it finally found us, and it stayed dramatic right to the very end. The driver kept calling my phone but couldn’t speak English, the cruise director couldn’t speak German, and for a while nobody could figure out where we were. She ended up talking to his supervisor, who told him where to go. When he finally opened the back of his van, the first thing I saw was two other suitcases that weren’t mine, and my heart dropped. Then he opened the second door, and there it was. My face products. My chocolate and collagen morning drink. Skye’s pickles. Clean underwear and socks. You truly do not realize how much you love your own ordinary things until you’ve gone five days without a single one of them.

And then, because that’s how my brain works now, I thought about the people who don’t get their bag back. People who flee their homes with nothing and have to start completely over, whether it’s war, fire, flood, or the person they live with. Here I was, mildly miserable about missing my skincare on a luxury river cruise through Europe. It put the whole ordeal right back into perspective, and I was grateful all over again, this time for something much bigger than my suitcase.

If you take one practical thing from this post, let it be this: on an international trip with a tight connection, pack a few days of essentials, one full change of clothes, and anything you genuinely can’t replace or function without into your carry-on. Not because it’s likely to go sideways, but because when it does, you want to be the family that shrugs and keeps going. We got there eventually. And the moment the ship pushed off, the whole miserable race to reach it started to feel like the price of admission to something wonderful.

Next up, Part 2: Down the Danube, where the actual cruise begins and we wake up in a different country nearly every morning.