I awakened this morning in a Barcelona hotel room to the view of a beautiful sunrise over the Mediterranean.\u00a0 Believe me, getting here was more than half the fun.<\/p>\n
Our journey started on Monday afternoon when our flight leaving Seattle was almost two hours late.\u00a0 In view of the fact that our Paris connection for our Barcelona flight was an hour and a half, we were concerned.\u00a0 After all, even if we made the flight, what if our luggage didn\u2019t?\u00a0 So what did I do on the nine hour flight\u2014watched two movies, started reading a book, played some solitaire, and worried.\u00a0 Did I sleep? Nope. I tried to, but worrying got in the way.\u00a0 After all, there\u2019s some history here.<\/p>\n
Years ago my parents went on a seven day Alaska cruise that departed from Seattle.\u00a0 They made it to Seattle, their luggage didn\u2019t.\u00a0 In fact, it didn\u2019t catch up with them until AFTER they we\u2019re back home.\u00a0 On the cruise, they had one set of clothing\u2014the ones they were wearing.\u00a0 The purser gave them an allowance to purchase whatever they needed.\u00a0 My mother, an old-fashioned farm girl who lived through the Depression, knew a thing or two about washing things out by hand, and she did so.\u00a0 As for the clothing allowance?\u00a0 She went to the gift shop and bought herself a lovely beaded evening bag which, in our family, has forever been known as \u201cthe purser\u2019s purse.\u201d\u00a0 By the way, on the cruise Norman and Evie received a prize for being the \u201cbest dressed\u201d people on board.<\/p>\n
Given that, as I was writing Man Overboard, it made perfect sense that Cami Lee would end up losing her luggage as she was heading for Southampton to meet up with a cruise ship. I had fun handling her mounting difficulties having landed with none of her goods.\u00a0 I enjoyed creating the fictitious Lost Luggage Retrieval System which a: Did not help her retrieve her luggage and b: Gave the bad guys information on her actual location.\u00a0 Oh, and I also had fun with her fictional shopping trip in Southampton where she had to buy EVERYTHING!<\/p>\n
But back to Monday and Tuesday.\u00a0 Bill is the official worrywart in our family.\u00a0 Before we ever boarded that late departing aircraft in Seattle, he was already agonizing over our short connection in Paris.\u00a0 Since he\u2019s an engineer, he did what he could about it, including printing out maps of the Charles de Gaulle Airport and mapping out our potential route from the arrival gate to the next departure gate.<\/p>\n
When we landed we were well prepared and set off at a stiff pace.\u00a0 It\u2019s a forty minute walk, including going through security where we both had to be patted down and have our luggage searched.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure we both bear a very strong resemblance to any number of potential terrorists.\u00a0 Once through that, we raced on.\u00a0 We arrived at the Barcelona bound gate two minutes after the twenty minute deadline.\u00a0 The gate agent had just finished canceling our seats, but because there were still people lined up on the jet way, he was able to rebook us.\u00a0 Unfortunately, our luggage did not get rebooked.<\/p>\n
We arrived in Barcelona and went to the luggage carousel where our luggage never appeared, see paragraph above.\u00a0 We waited and waited until all the other passengers had grabbed their goods and departed.\u00a0 That\u2019s when we finally approached the lost luggage lady.\u00a0 With a couple of quick phone calls she was able to confirm that our luggage was still on the ground in Paris.\u00a0 It would be put on the next plane and delivered to our hotel in the evening.\u00a0 It was.\u00a0 By the time it arrived at 7:30, we were already in bed and asleep.\u00a0 We asked the bell staff to just put it inside the door and let us stay asleep.<\/p>\n
So this morning, with our luggage well in hand, I\u2019m feeling downright civilized.\u00a0 Having gone to bed at 5:30 pm and awoken at 6:00 am, I can truthfully say I had a good night\u2019s sleep.<\/p>\n
I can also say that, without our months of walking, our sprints through two major airports would have taken far more of a toll.\u00a0 We\u2019re doing fine today.\u00a0 Not so for my Fitbit.\u00a0 It\u2019s having trouble syncing.\u00a0 It\u2019s saying I\u2019ve walked 8,000 steps today, and that for sure is NOT true.\u00a0 It also can\u2019t figure out how long I slept.\u00a0 If I lose the Fitbit steps for the cruise, so be it.\u00a0 By the way, a few minutes ago when I logged in and was unsuccessful in syncing it, I was told that I have 6,677,000 lifetime steps.<\/p>\n
Not bad for an old girl.\u00a0 Now it\u2019s time to take our luggage downstairs and get ready to board the Silver Whisper.<\/p>\n
Bon voyage!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I awakened this morning in a Barcelona hotel room to the view of a beautiful sunrise over the Mediterranean.\u00a0 Believe me, getting here was more than half the fun. Our journey started on Monday afternoon when our flight leaving Seattle was almost two hours late.\u00a0 In view of the fact that our Paris connection for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[165],"tags":[170,171,55],"class_list":["post-1393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-traveling","tag-airport","tag-luggage","tag-travel"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-mt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1393"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1394,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1393\/revisions\/1394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}