Back to My Regularly Scheduled Life

Time to move past the recent dramas and get back to my life as usual. And this next story will clearly illustrate my typical life . . .

Ahhh, the joys of traveling. The bliss of the last vacation has barely worn off yet and the stress of the next vacation is already starting to bite. It seems that we never take easy vacations. I remember thinking back to a trip to Maine we took several years ago. I went online and found a cottage to rent, emailed the owner, mailed a check and that was it. Several months later we got in the car, drove to Maine and had a lovely time. The extent of my vacation planning took approximately 20 minutes. I don’t think I ever experienced such an easy vacation planning before, or since.

Our last vacation wasn’t too bad. It only entailed our flights, one car rental, one motorcycle rental, and 5 different hotel reservations. Oh and, of course, lots of date coordination with friends. But overall, it wasn’t too bad. Now our next trip to Europe has been grueling and it’s still not done. Planning for travel to Europe is never an easy ordeal. Because I’m not familiar with the towns I have to cross-reference everything on a map. Most of the hotels do not have web sites and I simply cannot do business with non-connected establishments. It took me days to find a little hotel in the Alps of Northern Italy near the park we want to visit. I was so proud of myself for finding this perfect little place. Then two months later I get the dreaded email that starts with, “We regret to inform you . . .“ and it goes on to explain that the hotel is forced to close due to the economy. Now I have to start from scratch. But at least we still had the flights in place and that was half the battle.

So what do you think happens next? I spent a solid week planning our very complicated flights, calling back and fourth between two different airlines trying to coordinate Karlo’s paid business flight with my free flight. I had to find two separate itineraries that matched on the return trip. They had to qualify for a free ticket (and those are far and few between) and also fall into the company travel budget. If I found a flight that I could get for free, the paid flight was out of my company budget. The flights within the budget I couldn’t get on. It was painful, but I finally did it. And then yesterday we get the email that says, “Sorry to inform you, but a portion of your flight has been cancelled.” It’s only the portion that takes us over the Atlantic! Good grief almighty. Back to the drawing board with 5 more phone calls to two different airlines and Travelocity. I had to cancel Karlo’s original trip, rebook (at a higher price of course) and completely redo my trip. I dread the bills and paperwork arriving and trying to explain to the CFO what happened. What a complicated mess. I still need to book two rental cars, one motorcycle rental, and a hotel in Italy (at the very least). I keep putting it off because I just don’t want to do deal with it. It’s bad enough to have to plan everything once, but doing it twice is really irritating. We may just be walking and camping when we get there.