Safely arrived

So I left home to airport about 11 am Finnish time. At two pm my plane departed on schedule for Chicago. After 9,5 hours of uneventful flying I touched down on O'Hare International and cleared customs. After customs I learned that my plane to Dallas was 1h 20mins late so I would miss my next connection. I franticly ran to American Airlines rebooking center phone and the guy told me to go gate 11 to see if I could be bumped to an earlier flight, about to board in about 10-15 minutes. I got to the gate and the shift supervisor booked me to that filght, which means some poor soul was bumped to the already long standby list. But within minutes I was heading to Dallas confident I can make my connection.

Arriving Dallas I had about 20 minutes to get to my Albuquerque connection. I have to say the airport signage is quite poor and I wasted some precious minutes by figuring out first the correct gate and then trying to find the Skylink train. But eventually I made it.
At 22:40 Albuquerque time I touched down on schedule. My hostess was there at the airport waiting for me as agreed. She had been unsure if I turn up as she had been tracking the flights and knew that my original change in Chicago had gone bust.
Only thing that didn't go smoothly was that my luggage wasn't on the same plane as I was. However I was promised it would be delivered to me the next day.

That evening I had been up around 24 hours when I finally got to bed and dozed off right away. Flying from Europe to USA is in that sense really good, you usually arrive so that you can go to sleep right away. The other direction is much harder, you usually fly so that you land in the morning and get any little sleep on the plane and then have to face full day jet lagged.

After sleeping about 9 hours like a baby I woke up and soon after American Airlines called me and let me knew that my luggage would be soon delivered to me. And after about 3 hours later I was happily reunited with my luggage. I have to give American Airlines a big thanks for the outstanding service I received.

So after I had my luggage we headed out to do some shopping. See, I have this thing with IZOD brand shirts that I can't get from Finland. Every time I've been to USA I've bought at least one IZOD shirt to bring back. So we headed to JC Penney's and found out they have IZODs on sale. So I paid USD 50 for three shirts that would have costed 150 dollars regularly. So basically I got three shirts for the price of one. Not a bad deal at all. After buying the shirts we had luch at some Italian fast food place at the mall.

Then we did some grocery and household item shopping at Walmart and Target. I just love the American service attitude. Cashiers actually talk to customers here, in Finland a small talking and service oriented cashier is a rarity. I mean, yeah small talk is not in our culture but sometimes you don't even get hellos or good byes either.

The Sandia hills in Albuquerque are just gorgeous even from distance. They are breathtaking. Can't wait to see them closer up.

What is breathtaking as well is the heat, it must have been close to 40 degress Celsius today. And the desert wind is a not cooling wind, it's like a blow dryer adding to the heat. I immediately buried the idea of two day trip to Grand Canyon, there's no way we could do that even with aircon in the car.