BAD VACATION, Part One

EARTHBOUND TOMBOY

By Heidi Johnson-Wright

It started out as lovely trip, a mix of business and pleasure. But it began to go oh-so-horribly wrong just as our plane was making its descent to our destination.

The flight attendant -- who'd seen me board with a wheelchair -- asked me if I could walk down a flight of stairs. It seems the jet bridge service we'd been promised upon landing in Miami was not available. I suppressed the urge to make a snarky reply and assured her that, no, I could not do stairs in a wheelchair.

No problem, my husband and I were told. A lift would be provided to take me from the plane down to the tarmac. And technically speaking, this turned out to be true. Except the lift was brought to the plane about an hour after the rest of the passengers had de-boarded and been whisked away in a bus.

As we waited for the lift -- and 15, then 20, then 30-plus minutes passed -- we had visions of our luggage being stolen without us there to claim it.

Could someone from the airline secure our bags until we deplaned, crossed the tarmac and made it into the terminal? This request provoked smiles and the response -- along with circular hand gestures -- that we shouldn't worry, because our bags would just go "round and round" until we claimed them.

We finally made it to the baggage carousel about 75 minutes after our plane landed. Our bags were not going "round and round." Instead, our bags were nowhere to be found. So, instead of heading to the rental car shuttle queue, we had to stand in the airline's MIA luggage queue.

We filed the report no traveler wants to think about, then picked up our rental car. As we drove to our hotel, we tried to find the humor in the situation. We can shake this off, we told ourselves. The airline will deliver our bags to the hotel tomorrow, and all will be right as rain.

I called the airline the next day and gave the customer service rep our claim number. I was put on hold. The rep came back on and asked me where we had changed planes. I assured her it had been a direct flight, from Columbus, Ohio to Miami. She insisted our luggage could not have been lost unless we had changed planes. Did we catch our connecting flight in Chicago? For a few seconds, I considered if I'd been drugged or comatose during the flight, which might explain why I had no memory of changing planes. Then I realized my husband would have to have been comatose or whacked out, too.

Further attempts to explain that we suspected our bags had been stolen were pointless. And given that my husband had a job interview 24 hours later -- and no appropriate clothing to wear -- we headed our car not to the beach but to an outlet mall.

Okay, we had faced worse situations before. Outline a strategy, then carry it out. Our bags had contained a mixture of cheap garments but a few nice pieces as well: a Joseph Abboud dress shirt, a Richard Tyler suit jacket, a Versace skirt. If the airline were to locate our stuff, we should buy only modestly-priced things we needed to get by. But if our things were lost for good, shouldn't we get high quality stuff the airline would reimburse us for? Ultimately, we decided to go the budget route. We psyched ourselves up and hit that darn outlet mall like shopping commandos. Into the discount department stores we flew; out we came with bags of clothes. Success!

Not so fast. My husband and I lack the ideal body types that most clothes are designed for. Our new garments needed to be hemmed. Time to improvise again! That night, when I should have been on a chaise lounge savoring my third mai tai, I spent it "hemming" our stuff with cleverly hidden safety pins.