The final piece of the puzzle...

... has finally arrived! Yay! It took two more phone calls today but finally the last booking number and e-ticket number have been emailed to us. The problem in a nutshell:

* Against our wishes, the original booking was without a seat for Ellis: she would have had to sit on Martine's or my lap. That would be OK for a short flight, but we don't want that on a flight that takes more than 8 hours.

* The travel agency tried to correct this by creating a new booking for Ellis and removing her from the original booking.

* The big problem with this was that KLM/NorthWest/Delta did not accept a booking for a child without an adult accompanying her. The travel agency did try to 'connect' the two bookings but until today without much success.

But now everything is solved and Ellis is on the flight and she has her own seat too! Tomorrow Martine will still work for half a day but then we can really start preparing for our trip. Our flight is on Monday so we still have enough time. Some of you have asked why we are going to Michigan because, frankly, there's not that much to see there. The reason is that Martine has been an exchange student back in 1995 and this year there's going to be a reunion for her class. We have been visiting the family she lived with on several occasions before; this will be our fourth visit.

Edit: just noticed that my hand looks rather weird when viewing this image in large. It's the "cartoon" processing I did in the GIMP; my hands are not really this dirty...