August 10, 2021
Good so far
Not much to report, but no news is good news sometimes. We’re at the Newark airport, waiting to board beginning in about fifteen minutes. We’re just starting the third (and by far longest, of course) leg of the journey: by train from Hartford to New Haven; transfer to a second train to the Newark airport; flight to Amsterdam; train to Antwerp. Plus dragging our luggage a third of a mile from our Newark hotel to Union Station, and then a few more blocks at the other end to the hotel in Antwerp we just booked at the last minute last night.
There are so many gates to negotiate now, and so many ways you could flub it and arrive unprepared. So far though it looks like we nailed it. We electronically submitted our health questionnaire to Amtrak yesterday, and they let us board today. We uploaded copies of our passports and Amsterdam travel entry documents to United last night, and that nearly went as planned. Rachael’s travel document apparently failed to upload (the United website seems quite buggy), but we had a hard copy document with us as backup verification at check-in so that worked out fine. And we’ll arrive in Amsterdam tomorrow morning with the QR codes that Belgium sent us after we submitted and they accepted their travel notification document (every country in Europe seems to have their own, with their own information and submission requirements). So, other than the embarrassment of booking ourselves into the entire wrong month, we’re doing well.
One interesting detail. About two years ago we applied for Global Entry, a program for expediting border crossings into and out of the US. Among other things it grants you access to TSA Precheck because you’re a know, Vetter traveler. The application process finally completed, we have our Global Entry cards now, and this is the first time we planned to use them. However, United doesn’t know anything about this - and so our bording passes weren’t marked for TSA Precheck. And because so few airport staff even know what Global Entry is and how to work with it, we spent about a half hour finding someone who knew how to get our boarding passes reprinted with Precheck marked. It probably saved us a half hour being in the faster line, so today it was more or less a wash time-wise. Next time though we’ll know what to do - if we fly United.
So far, so good.
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