Flying Standby

Oh the perils of trying to fly standby!  It costs a lot of money to fly to South Africa and we weren't sure we wanted to risk flying standby again after the trouble we had trying to get to Belgium a few years back (didn't get on the plane in NYC and had to spend the night at a hotel, plus pay $50 each way for cab fare after waiting 5 hours in the airport, didn't get on the plane AGAIN the next night after being in the airport for 7 hours because airline employees like to take European vacations at the last minute and they're ahead of us on any standby list, so we got on a plane to London instead and bought tickets from there to Belgium, by the time we arrived we had been awake for 20 hours) so you can see why we were reluctant to go through that again. However, our daughter, who works for a major airline, assured us that we wouldn't be getting bumped on this flight because it is direct from the U.S. to South Africa and is 16 hours long. No airline employee decides to jump on a plane at the last minute for a 16 hour flight to Johannesburg. Okay! We'll do it!

What we hadn't accounted for was the fact that there are so few direct flights from here to there. Most flights to Johannesburg from the U.S. go through Amsterdam. It's a long flight to Amsterdam and an even longer one to South Africa plus the hassle of changing planes and spending even more time in an airport. People are willing to put up with a 16 hour direct flight, you get there quicker. So, those planes are selling out, filling up, overbooked, and we already know we won't be leaving on the 2nd, that flight is full, now we're just hoping to get on the plane on the 3rd. In middle seats. That's all that's left, middle seats in coach. Sixteen hours in coach between complete strangers. But at least we won't be paying $4000 - $4500 for tickets so I'm not going to complain, nope, nope. I'll just be so thankful to get on the plane, especially if I don't have to spend a night in Atlanta in August. Keeping our fingers crossed, or as they saying in South Africa, holding our thumbs!