Part 2:
PART 2
After spending a full day and two nights at the beautiful Marriott Frankfurt am Main (Pricelined at substantial savings!), it was time to head back stateside. I had personally managed to wander around the city twice, managing to avoid a big demonstration by some German university students (with 200+police cars!), enjoying the sights, finding a bakery near our hotel for breakfast and snacks, learning the ways of our hotel bar's Happy Hour (2-for-1 Binding Lagers FTW!) and watching an NFL game at said bar. My buddy Tim mainly slept in the hotel room and eventually managed to begrudgingly do one walking tour with me. We have different travel philosophies, but that's what makes these mileage runs so interesting. He often finds the fares and has the lounge access while I'm an almost-expert at finding places to visit in the city or having friends that can take us out for meals. Our differences were most noticeable when I woke up at 6AM on the morning we left to go get breakfast from that bakery I mentioned above. Tim decided to order room service. My breakfast? A whopping 3 Euro for a pastry and Coke light. Tim's? 22 Euro for cereal, juice and pastry.
Our flights home:
FRA-DTW NW A330-300
DTW-MSP NW 757-200
MSP-GFK NW DC-9
We arrived at T2 in Frankfurt and made our way to the Northwest check-in counter. When arriving we had to make an important decision: do we go in the World Business Class/Elite line or in the coach line? WBC was chock-a-bock full for this flight across the pond. Coach was nearly empty. The decision was made to try the WBC line, which as it turned out took much longer than the coach line (oh...the irony!). After being asked those funny security questions they stopped asking in the USA years ago (who packed your bags?) we waited and waited for the next available KLM agent. We had picked out seats online the night before in Row 10--the exit row bulkhead at the front of coach, but it turned out Northwest's Load management system decided to move us elsewhere. After inquiring about the row 29 bulkhead, both Tim and I were changed to 29 H&J, window and aisle seats on the bulkhead. More on this later. After getting a new stamp in my passport we proceeded through security x2 and on to our gate. We availed ourselves there of the free European Maxim magazines (being near-adolescents, the frivolity of the Euro version was too good to be true). Once onboard the airplane the flight attendants were out en masse to make sure that no one sat in rows 10-21 in Coach due to "weight and balance" restrictions. When we tried to move up, we were promptly yelled at and made to go back to our seats. The load factor in coach for this flight was well below 50% and more than likely below 25%. After takeoff we were allowed to move around--I took the row of 4 seats on the bulkhead in row 12 as well as 12 H&J for my meal and movie. Almost everyone/every party had their own center row of 5 to spread out in.
The food onboard wasn't very good...I had chicken with a creamy sundried tomato sauce and rice. The service was a lot less attentive than that of KLM and the F/As had the typical "Northwest bitter" taste to them. The flight was incredibly long--almost 9 hours. During that time the F/As mainly hung around the galleys, but actually made time to furnish glasses of water/orange juice and snacks on the counters for passengers. I managed to spread out and get a few hours of sleep on my row of four. As we began our descent into Detroit the flight attendants rounded everyone up again and made us return to our assigned seats. I still don't understand why and I guess I never will.
After making our way through Immigration and Customs with only minor delay we headed to the WorldClub and signed up for showers. After making ourselves squeaky clean we headed back downstairs to Chili's for some real, non-NW lounge food (string cheese, crackers and snack mix only go so far). After that, we returned back to the refuge of the WorldClub and caught up on the internet for the rest of our layover in DTW (internet at the 4-star Marriott was 25 Euro per day--I could have found a $25 more expensive 2 star hotel with free internet...why is it always that way?).
Worldperks Platinum Elite Tim and Silver Elite Martin both got upgraded on our DTW-MSP flight. Hub-to-Hub upgrades are hit-and-miss (usually miss) for lowly Silvers like me, so I was happy with the free scotch and "enhanced snack box." This flight was happily staffed by F/As who kept the scotch rolling. Woo hoo!
We were originally booked on the last CRJ into Grand Forks but arrived in DTW early enough to catch the second-to-last DC-9 into GFK. Having been placed on the standby list in DTW, we headed to the gate for our assignments. The agent there was clearly a bit overwhelmed and had no idea what she was doing. In the process of confirming our seats she managed to create a completely new reservation for the both of us and was unable/too busy to add our WP numbers. It took nearly a month and a half to get the miles credited, even after submitting a compliant to NW's customer service. Neither of us were upgraded for this flight and were just happy to get home. This was the first of three DC-9 flights out of GFK that I haven't been upgraded on this year. I've been really lucky elsewhere, including DEN-MSP, JAX-MSP, MSP-MEM and the aforementioned DTW-MSP.
Overall it was another fun trip and successful MR. I managed to accrue 16,421 miles and 8 segments out of the trip, making the $438 investment very worthwhile (I believe my math says it was about $.02 per mile).