How does one get from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Cordoba Spain? It’s a long long story. One that doesn’t start at the Albuquerque airport because one can’t fly with a dog and two cats from Albuquerque to somewhere else and then on to Europe.

It took us 6 days in fact, to get from there to here, from December 2 to December 8.

We sold the house in Santa Fe in November. Gary retired from the State of New Mexico on November 15. We rented a Chrysler Pacifica to drive us and pets to the Denver airport. 

We would fly from Denver to Frankfurt to Madrid on December 2 & 3.  Would fly on December 2. But didn’t fly on December 2.

At the Denver airport, where we were to depart via business class for the 10 hour flight to Germany, we were informed that our pets were not confirmed to fly.  Huh?  Now what?

Now we negotiate with several Lufthansa personnel who, by turns, give us several differing reasons as to why they could not put our pets under the plane, as agreed. Over two or three hours we argued then deemed more argument fruitless then agreed we could stow two pets beneath the plane and take one in the cabin. The next day. The flight we’d booked had, by this time, gone to Europe without us.

We had returned our Chrysler van rental hours before. We are now stranded in Denver with no way to transport a life’s worth of luggage and three priceless pets. We demand that Lufthansa pay for a hotel room. We demand that they keep our luggage at the airport. We demand a rental car. No, no, and no.

We get on the phone with a rep who speaks terrible English in a heavy French accent. We want to talk to a manager. We hold for 15 minutes until the hapless rep returns to tell us Non, Non, Non. So we rent another van and load several hundred pounds of luggage to go in search of a hotel around Denver that takes pets.

Stay tuned for part 2… escape from Denver