What a long strange trip

We're sitting in the hostel after a little Italian food (our first in a LONG time) and reflecting on the day we've just had.

To catch you up...  After 2 legs of a 3-legged trip we have been through 3 things that I've never seen first-hand in my years of airline travel.

When we arrived in Simferopol the flight to Kiev was delayed by 1 and then later 2 hours.  This isn't that weird but we later learned that the delay was due to Aerosvit's employees striking.  Sergey told me that he actually saw the striking pilots drinking beer outside the airport while he waited for us at the Kiev airport.  Our 12:15PM flight left the airport at 6PM but not before Cam had puked in the camp car.

We spent a day in Kiev with Sergey on Tuesday which was nice but not quite as productive as we had hoped it could be.

We got up this morning (Wednesday) at 2AM to make our 5:30AM flight.  We got to the terminal on time and proceeded to the check-in line where we waited and waited and waited.  After the line not moving for 15 minutes I realized that the desks (for the second time in 48 hours) wasn't working at all.  The rumors were that the computers were broken.  Eventually the line started creeping - about the time our flight was supposed to leave - and we were issued a hand-written boarding pass!  It turns out Lufthansa's entire global check-in network had crashed.

After waiting for the rest of the passengers to get their passes and get on the plane we headed out... maybe only 2 hours late at this point.  At this point I thought we were home free - as good as in Frankfurt.  As we were getting up in the air an old guy went back to the toilet and as the stewardess tried to explain that he needed to return to his seat, he collapsed.  They helped him for a while including busting out the defibrillators.  Sooo we turned around and went back to Kiev.

This is getting long...

To sum up, after the sick gentleman was off-loaded and we refueled, we took off again and made it to Frankfurt almost 4 hours late only to find our bags were wandering around the airport.  We found them after 2 more hours and then spent a few hours trying to find Kremena and the right train.

We left our room in Kiev at 2AM and didn't get to our hostel until 3PM... all for a 2.5 hour flight.  Cam is not amused.