Out of Touch, Overwhelmed, and Completely Exhausted

That about sums it up. I’m buried up to my eyeballs with things to do, both at work and at home. How could so much stuff accumulate in two weeks. Oh, that’s right . . . when I’m not traveling I’m working around the clock every single day. Of course things are going to pile up in my absence.

Add to that feeling of being overwhelmed the fact that I’m completely jet-lagged and sleep deprived. It took us 25 straight hours of traveling to get home. We got up at 4AM European time (which is 10PM the night before here at home) and endured the longest day ever of flying and sitting around in 4 different airports until we finally got home close to 11 PM. We had breakfast in Croatia, lunch in Paris, and dinner in DC. It was a long and tiring day to say the least, but it was also, by far, our best record ever for traveling either to or from Croatia. The last time we came home from Croatia it took us 44 hours. And getting there this time . . . well, that’s a whole ‘nother story. That trip took us 53 hours! Here’s the story.

We were scheduled to leave Bradley at 11AM and being the completely anal folks that we are (OK Karlo is) we left the house at 8AM to get to the airport nice and early. And it’s a good thing we did. We got to check in were told that we only had one reservation instead of two. I booked this trip over the phone (and had to pay a $15 fee to do so) because I wanted to make sure that I had a professional helping me so there were no glitches. Considering we used Karlo’s miles to book the flights and I repeatedly said “we need to be here or there” and “can we sit together?” etc. somehow the agent goofed and only put the reservation in for one person–me. In a nutshell it was a NIGHTMARE. I was practically in tears and on the phone with an agent for at least one hour trying to rebook a trip at the very last minute to a tiny remote airport with all of two gates. Two things I’ve learned from traveling to Croatia, it’s one of the most beautiful countries in the world, but also extremely difficult to get to. My shoulder was killing me.

Well, it was nothing short of a miracle that we got flights to and from on the days (sort of) that we had originally intended. I say “sort of” because we were due to arrive in Croatia on Saturday morning (already had a hotel booked and paid for in Dubrovnik), but instead we had a one day layover in Brussels, Belgium. I was not too happy, but was counting my blessings that we should still make it to the ship on time. Since we had several hours to kill and thank God I brought a small laptop with me and Bradley has free Wifi. I jumped online and amused myself for that long wait. I not only booked us a hotel attached to the airport in Brussels, but I researched the city and found us fun things to do. I quickly went from being very irritated to very excited about having a bonus side trip to a different country. Things were looking up.

As usual I documented every day of our journey and I will be using the next week or so to blog about it with photos. Please stay tune if you’re interested in taking the journey with me. Otherwise, the blog will be back to it’s normally rambling in a about a week or two . . .