We thought that we had a seat on the flight from Frankfurt to Venice.

Before we left Florida, when we learned that our flight from Frankfurt to Venice had been canceled, I immediately called Lufthansa. I was assured that we had a seat on the 4:00 flight to Venice today.

That was an exaggeration.

What we found when we got to Frankfurt was that we were on standby for the 4:00 flight to Venice. If we didn’t get seats on that flight, we would be on standby for the next flight, until we finally got a flight to Venice.

We also learned that this was all due to a three-hour Italian air traffic controller strike… Right when our flight was to land in Venice.

So we hung out in the Frankfurt airport for several hours. We enjoyed a delightful lunch of pressed sandwiches, followed by a super flaky (and delicious!) chocolate croissant with a cappuccino.

After waiting six hours on standby in Frankfurt, we didn’t make it onto the next flight. They had one seat but we told the Lufthansa agent, with the biggest smiles that we could muster, that we would wait until we could both fly.

She then checked the next flight to see where we were on the standby list…not bad…we were numbers two and three. She said that they had a few seats that were likely to be open. It was a pretty good bet that we would be on that flight. We agreed to wait before bailing and finding a place to spend the night.

And then…we got boarding passes!  There was a long bus ride across the tarmac to the plane. Adriel joked that we might be boarding in Austria. Tight flight, pretty full, with our carryons under the seats in front of us….feet squeezed in.  But we were ecstatic to be finally flying to Venice.

The sun set as we flew into Italy…we could see the Italian Alps out one window, and the most spectacular sunset out the other side of the plane. It seemed like a good omen after all the waiting in Frankfurt for a seat on the flight.

We were ready to be in Venice.