Barely a stone’s throw from Boston, its pretty safe to say that we spent more time checking in, going through security, and sitting on the runway, than we actually did in the air, but it’s an easy first flight for a trip as long as this.
Everything was going pretty smoothly. We landed without hassle and headed over to the Continental Service desk to see what we had to do to get our next boarding pass. They directed us towards the Malaysian Airlines desk in the terminal where our flight would leave.
In talking to the girl here, I gave the girl my boarding pass and sleeve for it. Earlier Jason and I had talked about how we both used to save all of our flight stubs, but how I no longer wanted to do this since I fly so much now and they just become clutter. So when the girl gave me my ticket back I tossed my sleeve in the rubbish to lessen the number of papers I had in my pocket, and put the used boarding pass back into my pocket, thinking it might still be useful.
Once we arrived at the Malaysian Airlines we discovered that they didn’t have any day flights, so their desks were all closed till 7pm. We wondered the concourse for a while and grabbed a bit to eat before heading back over to the ticketing desk.
At 7 we got in line and the people in front of us were served, and we made our way to the front of the line. We checked in, got our boarding passes and then they asked for our baggage slips…. which were on the sleeves to our original boarding passes… Great..
It turned out this was no big deal. We just ran over to the Continental desk and they showed us that this information was actually on our passes as well so we were fine. But this lead to us to think, “Why did they need this anyways?”.
When we checked in originally, the bag tags said Penang, and we were told our bags would go straight through. But from what we could tell, Malaysian Airlines in Newark had to manually write down all of these numbers, and then search through what we imagine to be a mountain of bags stuck in luggage purgatory…
Its been about 30 hours since we last saw our bags, but I’m pretty confident that it will all work out. We’re at the airport now before our last connecting flight in Malaysia so we’ll find out soon!