When someone goes on a trip, they can lose their suitcases

The good Lord, or perhaps also his nasty counterpart, the man with the horns and the horse's foot, has put the long journey ahead of a relaxing holiday.

Since we find it terrible to have to make the long journey by car in the middle of the night, we usually spend the night in a hotel at the airport. This time we chose the Intercity BER, which is significantly cheaper compared to the previous top dog, the Steigenberger, but no less good.

It's October 29th. At 4:30 a.m. we set out to fly over the Atlantic Ocean to start our adventure in The Big Easy, New Orleans.

For the crossing we chose the flagship of German aviation, Lufthansa.

The formalities on the longest and certainly most expensive construction project in Berlin's history, BER, are surprisingly straightforward and I'm slowly starting to feel really comfortable at this airport.

At 7:40 sharp, the Kranichairline, which has invested a lot of money in developing a new logo, takes off for Frankfurt. (The big innovation in the Lufthansa logo is that the color yellow was removed from this logo and the crane is now only surrounded by blue)

We are on board the plane, three cheerful vacationers with our well-packed luggage.

Having landed in Frankfurt, we now have to achieve top sporting performances in order to reach our connecting flight to Houston, because Lufthansa's motto here is that the lighter the customers are when they take off, the less fuel is required. So the transfer times are kept so that every customer has to complete a short workout in the form of sprinting from one gate to the next and going through the exit check. No problem for us. But for the Fraport employees, as we later find out.

We make ourselves comfortable in our expensive seats with more legroom, now the vacation can begin. Ready for take off to Houston Intercontinental Airport.

Of course, the otherwise long and quiet flight is not without a big highlight.

Matthias, who wants to treat himself to something good, receives the friendly but firm answer when he asks the nice older stewardess whether he could have a whiskey, "There are no more spirits on our flights."

Since he is very flexible, he stylishly switches to a tomato juice, which then immediately tips over and turns his seat into a red pool of tomato juice. Yeah great, tomato juice on my husband's seat, pants and shirt.

All attempts to remove the tomato juice from my shirt and pants fail and so I sit for 10 hours next to a man who is freezing, trying to get some sleep and who smells like a bottle of ketchup.

We bravely survive this flight and land in Houston, Texas" Yeehaw"

The Americans have developed a strange transit procedure that says that on a transit flight, all passengers who have booked onward flights must first collect their luggage and then check it in again.

Since the immigration control is the shortest of our lives and only consists of "Hello, are you here on vacation?", we stand at the baggage carousel relatively quickly and wait for the cowboys of the Houston airport to transport our luggage onto the carousel and exactly from that point on everything goes wrong.

The baggage carousel and the lines of waiting tourists divide, leaving behind three excited people whose luggage obviously didn't make it to Houston. Every traveler's nightmare becomes reality for us. Our luggage lost in the vastness of the Lufthansa universe.

We are referred to a colleague who takes care of missing suitcase reports.

I'll be back in 30 minutes, we read on his door. Yes, exactly, that's how it has to be. The most important person at the airport for us is taking a break.

But we have three hours until the onward flight to New Orleans, so everything is fine.

The competent employee then tells us that he doesn't know where our suitcases are either, but we should fly on, the suitcases will definitely arrive tomorrow.

What kind of stupid statement is that? But what should we do, we can't be helped here. "Houston, we have a problem".

Okay, what the hell, we have to admit defeat and travel to New Orleans without a suitcase. The prospect of not having to wait at the baggage carousel in New Orleans is also of little comfort to us.

When you arrive at your destination, you say, where is the person responsible for the suitcases? After 24 hours on our feet, we drag ourselves to the lost luggage counter and for the first time have the feeling that we are being helped. The case is recorded, we receive a link where we can see how far our luggage has made it and completely exhausted, we just want to go to our guest house and sleep.

Tomorrow everything will be better, tomorrow the sun will shine and tomorrow we will continue looking for our suitcases. Goodnight New Orleans.

PS The research of our daughter, who is helping us look for the suitcases in Germany, has shown that the suitcases were loaded onto the plane in Frankfurt and then immediately unloaded again. Hello? Was the workout for the tourists, prescribed by Lufthansa in the form of impossible transfer times, not effective enough and we were too heavy so that the suitcases simply could not be transported?

Lufthansa, shorter connection times are needed.

Irony off.