You may have noticed the lack of photos and updates from our trip to Brussels last weekend… and that’s because we never made it.

Our flight was delayed over two hours out of Raleigh (due to Atlanta weather) and even though we were repeatedly told that all flights were delayed and our outgoing flight was probably delayed as well, we missed it. By a good 45 minutes. The Brussels flight wasn’t even listed on the monitors by the time we landed (never a good sign).

Once we missed the flight, Delta had automatically rebooked us on a flight for the next day, but that would have cut our time in Brussels to one day and it didn’t seem worth it to us. So we stood in line and waited on hold and booked a flight back to Raleigh with the idea of having the un-used miles redeposited back into our accounts.  We were still stuck in Atlanta for the night, but thankfully we have friends in town, so after a 45 minute MARTA trip we had some thai takeout and a couch to crash on.

After arriving home the next day we got back on the phone to see what, if anything, could be done about our non-refundable hotel reservations. The hotel representative in Belgium said they would make a one-time exception and offered to rebook us for a different date – when did we want to come?

Ummmm.

This prompted another 1+ hour phone call to Delta reservations to see if we could rebook the entire vacation for next March. Unbelievably, the agent was able to reuse our miles and extend our trip two more days for mid-March 2010.

Even though this trip was interrupted, we were ultimately able to salvage our miles and the hotel charges. A huge thanks to Sharisse and Theresa at Delta reservations for helping make a busted trip into a vacation for another time.

As it is with most things in life, we often remember the last thing that happened to us on a trip, especially if it’s bad. As the title of this post states, I am determined to not let that happen with our recent trip to St. Martin.  So let’s get it out of the way – what happened on the way home?

Well, upon arrival at the airport for our flight home we found out our return flight was preemptively canceled by Delta (claiming weather, of course) the previous day. After working our way through the line we were booked on to a Continental flight through Newark the following day.

Once we knew we were stuck on the island for the night  the helpful people at the tourism desk were able to put me in touch with Fawnette at Azure Beach Studios, one of the alternate places we had investigated, who fortunately had a room available for the night.

Upon arrival to our room, we flipped on the TV to see what all the fuss was about and nearly cried when we saw that the storms that were messing with Atlanta were heading straight for New York… the new destination the Delta agents had just booked us on for next day. We reacted to this news by changing into our bathing suits,  heading to a local market to buy some beer, and trying to relax on the beach, carefully rationing the small amount of suntan lotion we had left.

The next day we headed back to the airport, three hours before our flight, to discover that the new flight we were booked on was unsurprisingly canceled (again) and Continental had rebooked us on a flight for Wednesday. TWO DAYS LATER!

So we smiled, thanked them kindly, and marched back to Delta to convince them to put us on the flight to Atlanta where we could at least standby for an RDU flight.  Five hours later, we were in the air to Atlanta. After clearing customs we waited till about 1am for our delayed standby flight that finally got us home at 2:30am. All told, a good 28 hours later than originally planned, with about 16 hours spent in the airport.

Whew.

Thankfully, we really did had a lovely time on St. Martin, driving from beach to beach, enjoying French wine and cheese on our patio overlooking the Caribbean Sea, and sampling several restaurants that were always outdoors.

So, I’ll leave you with this photo… photos and a full trip report will follow soon!

Finally, AFTER FIVE MONTHS, Delta granted me the double miles for our Zurich trip from their Europe winter promotion. Eric received his miles at the end of May only after emailing them several times. I actually had to fax the head office (after they sent me an email stating that ‘they didn’t think’ I had registered for the promotion), but we’re talking about almost 10K extra miles here, so you better believe I’m not going away.

While I was at it, I faxed AA regarding our codeshare miles for the roundtrip flight to Barcelona. The tickets were purchased on Iberia.com, but we flew American metal over there. Granted, we’ve only been back a month, but I’d rather get the miles into my account before I find the need to use them!

We also both have a free roundtrip ticket anywhere Southwest flies that we have to use before the end of March. Any suggestions? :)