Terminal troubles: 'Your passport has expired'

We embarked on what would become a three-day adventure spent entirely on airplanes and in airports. We traveled from Gettysburg to Washington's Reagan National Airport, and took a connecting flight to John F. Kennedy Airport in New York.

We arrived on time, about 7 p.m., at Terminal 8. Signs told us to go to Gate 7 in Terminal 9 to board our 10:10 p.m. flight to Buenos Aires. Terminal 8 to Terminal 9. It sounded easy. But our march would become a trek through a rabbit warren on steroids.

The course would cover nearly a mile, not counting two moving sidewalks that didn't move, through what looked like a series of permanently unfinished rooms, some the size of ballrooms.

Inadequate or misleading signs led us on. The trek finally took us to what we thought was the right concourse, but the security employee who greeted us said, "No, I think flight 955 departs from Gate 24" in Terminal 8.

We schlepped our luggage back through the rabbit warren until we finally found a monitor listing all American departures. Gate 7 was indeed the proper gate. We returned, sweating. The security employee apologized and sent us on.

The end of the concourse was littered with bodies, some of whom were fortunate and found seats. The crowd was divided into people waiting for a flight to Paris and those waiting for our overdue flight to Buenos Aires.

All but one of the vendors had closed. He distributed $2 cups of bad coffee and doughy, stale $9 sandwiches filled with some combination of thin meat and thinner cheese.

About the time our plane originally was to have taken off, a loudspeaker informed us that the gate had changed. Back to Gate 24, Terminal 8. The posted new time was 11:15 p.m. The plane left about 11:45 p.m.

The highlight of the trip was provided by the couple behind us, who spent all night being loud and obnoxious in English, French and Spanish.

Now we come to my second stupid mistake. Delighted that we had landed safely after an 11-hour flight, we queued up to get our passports checked. Susan got through easily. Then the man in the booth checked my passport. He was about to return it when he stopped and said, "Do you have another passport? This one has expired." It had died two months earlier.

Officials escorted me into their office complex and invited me to sit in a straight chair in the middle of a large room. After about 15 minutes of mumbling among themselves and pecking repeatedly at computer keyboards, they asked me why I allowed my passport to expire.

I explained that I was as surprised as they, and was quick to point out that my passport had been accepted without question at JFK.

That was the airline's fault, they said, not Immigration Argentina's. Now they would send me back on the next flight to New York.

I asked if I could contact the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires, so the officials supplied phone numbers that I could use if I spent $50 for a day pass at American Airlines' Admirals Club. But I was not allowed to leave the airport to go to the embassy.

After wading through a series of telephone answering tapes and prodding real, live embassy personnel, I was connected with the vice consul in charge of citizen services, Kimberly Atkinson.

"If you can get here, we would be happy to clear this all up for you," she told me. "But it's entirely up to Argentine immigration to decide if they will let you come here. We cannot order them to let you go."

"Is there anything I can do?" I asked.

"You can tell them that you had this conversation with me and we agreed to straighten out your problem if they let you come here," she said.

Back to the Admirals Club phone. Now I was able to speak with a Senor Moreno, who apparently had some authority, but his English turned out to be almost as bad as my Spanish. Through an interpreter, Moreno told me that all I needed to do was persuade the U.S. embassy to send him a written request for a temporary disembarkation.

"Oh, no, we don't do that," Atkinson replied when I asked her. She then uttered words I thought had become a movie cliche: "That's our policy."

"Why?" I meekly asked.

"Because we have no way of knowing that the person is really you," she said. "And they know that if I sent such a request, they would turn it down anyway. It's the airline's fault, and they are going to get fined $3,000 by the FAA [Federal Aviation Authority] for letting you get through JFK. If they had caught the mistake there, you could have paid a couple of hundred dollars and it would have been taken care of in a couple of hours."

Maybe I could ask the FAA to give me the $3,000 instead, I thought--but didn't say. That's what we had already paid for this trip.

"Look, I have had this conversation so many times. They never let anybody come to the embassy," Atkinson said. "If I came there to the airport, the process would take about 2 1/2 hours, and I can't set that precedent."

Then she paused. "You know, yesterday they actually did let someone get here. I almost fell out of my chair."

But that someone wasn't me. By now, assisted by my host family and their friends in Buenos Aires, people at Gettysburg College had hit the phones on my behalf. They reached our congressman, and his staff contacted the State Department in Washington. About 4:30 p.m., I got through to Moreno.

"Oh, yes, we heard from them," he said. "I am just now waiting for the embassy to send me a request for a temporary disembarkation."

When I again called the embassy, I talked with an after-hours security guard who said he looked for Ms. Atkinson, but she must have left for the day.

My time was up. I wished I could find a priest to administer last rites.

"That's happening more and more all over the world," a knowledgeable American told us on the plane returning to New York. "Other countries are getting upset with us because we have placed such restrictions on visitors to our country. In Brazil, it takes months for an American to get an entry visa. Why? Because it takes months for a Brazilian to get an entry visa to the United States."

We returned to JFK after three days of catnapping in upright seats, no showers, bad airport food and nice airline people--most of them--who couldn't do a thing for us. Three days, $3,000, no vacation, no steaks, no tango, no gauchos on the Pampas. No travel stories.

My wife is still going to kill me.

Postscript: Or maybe not. American Airlines decided to reimburse us for the snafu flight--and we will be returning to Argentina in late October with my new, valid passport.

Chicago Tribune