IQ - World traveller.....we hope.
Speaking of stress.....
The CBB & I were talking one evening about this trip (about which I am excited, but a bit nervous -- meeting The Parents is a sortof Big Thing, in my book), and the topic of passports came up. "A person should always always always have a valid passport", says I. And I relay the story of my friends who won a radio contest, and found themselves faced with a trip to Australia in 3 weeks' time, with no passports for either of them. I also recalled learning a bit of a lesson from some former co-workers who were booked to fly to London, and realized when they got to the airport that one of them had a passport that expired1 month after their trip ended.
No problem, you say.
Tell that to the nice people working immigrations & customs in London, who might not be so keen to give you a visitor visa which allows you to stay for up to 6 months, if your passport expires in 1 month. Maybe you're trying to get in, and have no intention of leaving. How do they know?
So, CBB says, jokingly, "I'd better check mine, then!" And waddya know? His expires a week after we fly back from Canada. So, off he goes to get al the necessary paperwork to get it renewed. Boy, Cananda has a lot of paperwork, rules and restrictions. I guess government is government is government.
That was almost 2 weeks ago.
We're booked to leave in 2 days, and no CBB passport. And while it's not required to travel, it sure makes things a lot easier. But, given that he had to send in his old passport, and his birth certificate to get the renewal, my beau may or may not be headed home to mum's cooking this wekeend. Boy, I hope so - I'm dying to meet the family.
So here's my Insightful Question out of all this:
What's the most stressful travel situation you've had?
As for me, it's a toss-up between
- not knowing until 4:30 the day before BessFren and I were supposed to leave whether or not our airfare to Curacao had been ticketed (it was a freebie I won through work; lots of rules & restrictions)
and
- driving 100+ mph down the M40 from Oxford to London, hoping to high heaven that we made it in time for our flight (remembering along the way that we had to drop the car off. And oh, crap, gotta gas up, too). We got checked in, in time, but then got picked to be the lucky ones to have our luggage inspected with a fine-tooth comb. My companions were not very understanding about my wigging-out. It's just that I dont deal well with being Very Late. Makes me kinda crazy.
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Postscript:
10/10: So, we're not in Canada after all. About noon on Friday, this Impatient Girl called the Canada Passport office to ask if, when they send out a passport, they generally let the recipient know what the tracking number is. I never did get the answer to that, but the guy I talked to asked for the CBB's date of birth and last name. I gave it to him -- hesitantly, as their site warns that calling and asking for a status could result in a delay. He pulled it up, and said, rather casually, that they hadn't started on it yet. Which made me wonder, why do they include a line on the application that asks for your departure date? they didn't even make an effort to try to get this started before CBB was scheduled to leave. Grr....
So, we're rescheduled to go in November -- thus starting the countdown all over again. But it gives me a bit more time to find something to wear that's more suitable than my many T-shirts. And figure out if the idea I had for a hostess gift is really the best I can come up with. ThinkThinkThink.....
posted by PammyJean at 3:44 pm
7 Comments:
For me, it's gotta be that college trip to a Music Therapy Conference in the middle of November. Early flight, no problem. Snow on the roads from night before, no problem. Picked everyone up on time. Doing good. Unfortunately, after putting the last girl's luggage in the trunk, I locked the keys in there too! (old Olds, no back seat entry.) NOW we have a problem! Fortunately, my b/f had a spare set. Across town. He's sleeping (it's early, mind you). Finally get the spare keys and are on our way. On the snowy highway (pre-E470), in my old Olds (no snow-tires), frantically driving 70+ to try and make our flight. Harrowing and stressful, but we made it! (Barely...)
Have fun in Canada (if you make it)!
hmmm...not having done a whole lot of fancy travelling let's see....
Well probably the "worst" vacation was in May 2003 when I pretty much forced Dave to accompany me to visit my friend Shawn in Las Vegas. That was the summer we were breaking-up and so needless to say it wasn't a real hoot of a time!
Then there was the time we went to Hawaii (for my dad's memorial service) and dumb Dave lost his drivers license the night before our flight. Thankfully this was pre-9/11 and we managed to finagle him on to the plane but this also meant the entire time in Honolulu we didn't go to any clubs like we'd planned on or rent scooters to get around the island.
It would take too long to type it again so here's a link.
http://gunsmoke.blogspot.com/2004/10/oh-rats.html
So Pammy...they don't have the intraweb in Canuckia? How's the trip going?
Long story, bear with me...
I flew back from a semester in London, the day after terrorists downed a plane over Lockerbie, Scotland. I had headphones on and was engrossed in a book, so it didn't seem that odd to me that our plane just sat there for an hour and a half after we left the gate. But when the plane started to move, we did not head for the runways. Instead, we were escorted by lots of vehicles with flashing lights to a tiny, remote corner of Heathrow, whereupon a nice, gentlemanly chap announced over the PA system that a message had appeared in one of the bathrooms after we left the gate. He said he did not want to get into specifics, "except, suffice to say, a word in the message began with a b and ended with a b."
So, as I understood it, a day after a bomb (it was assumed) took down a plane flying nearly the same route as mine was supposed to take, someone on my plane wrote a message (in lipstick, on a mirror, I imagined) announcing his/her intention to blow up the plane. Nice.
We sat still on the tarmac for a long time, watching the flurry of vehicular activity outside, before we received instructions to exit the plane (a British Airways 747, about half full, headed to Chicago) and get on "coaches" (i.e., buses) that had been parked under the wings of the plane. We were to wait there until all of the luggage had been removed from the cargo hold and lined up in long rows on the tarmac. One at a time, we were let off the buses and asked to walk along the lineup of bags and identify our own. We were told that, once all luggage had been identified by passengers, any remaining unidentified luggage -- and everything that was left on the plane when we got on the buses -- would be removed. Then, we had the option to get back on the plane and fly to Chicago (much delayed, of course), or take another flight.
OK. While I was waiting for my turn to ID my bags, I had a decision to make. Did I really want to get back on this plane? After all, the "mad bomber" presumably put the message in the bathroom after we left the gate. Which meant that all he/she had to do was point to their bag with the bomb in it and get back on the plane, right?
But the couple who was sitting next to me on the plane explained to me they were originally booked on the Pan Am flight that went down over Lockerbie the day before, but needed an extra day in London and rebooked their return flight on BA. And the fact that they were alive to explain this to me wasn't lost on me.
They told me they were getting back on the plane. So for me, the choice was a no-brainer. I got back on the plane.
But first I had to identify my bag, which was... not there. After nearly five hours of this stress, I discovered BA never put my bags on the plane. Perfect.
I took a deep breath and thought about it for a second. If the bags didn't make this flight, they probably made another one. And that later flight probably was already on its way to Denver, having made my original connection in Chicago.
And that's exactly what happened. My bag showed up on the carousel in Denver, where my family was waiting for me to come back from my semester abroad. Except I didn't get off the plane. And BA had a policy of not discussing these sorts of incidents with anyone. All they could tell my parents (who had read about and seen footage of the fiery crash in Lockerbie) was that I had been "delayed for unspecified reasons."
I arrived in Chicago 10 hours after my flight was originally scheduled to arrive there, and seven hours after I was supposed to be in Denver. Obviously, the plane did not blow up. But to that point, my parents had no information as to either my whereabouts or my safety. It was 2 in the morning when I got off the plane in Chicago and called home.
I had no idea how hard this had been on me, emotionally and physically, until my mom answered the phone and I heard her voice. My legs went weak and I had to lean against the wall. My sister (who up to that point in our lives had been mostly a little brat), got on the phone. She couldn't speak for 30 seconds, she was crying so hard. Finally, she blurted out: "Billy, don't die."
At that point, I lost it. I started to sob, convulsing against a wall, at a payphone somewhere in the empty hallways of O'Hare.
Ever since then, travel's been pretty much a breeze.
Wow, guys....
Those are some doozy stories.
I just hope that I never have a competing tale!!
Thanks for posting!!!!
Well, I have to say that I dont have a story quite like Bill's...but I'll share anyway. Most stressful definitely has to be when I was a camp counselor in PA and was flying from Denver to Newark, NJ connecting in Chicaco. I didnt buy my own tickets, the camp did, so I had no control over the flight schedules. So, some genius at the camp thought that a person could get from one gate all the way across the entire O'Hare Airport to the other gate in 25 minutes (as in 25 minutes between my scheduled landing and my scheduled takeoff)...needless to say, I was doing my best "O.J. in the airport" commercial to get there, and still having to hope that my steamer trunk (with all my stuff to last me 3 months away from home) would make it with me. Luckily, my luggage and I made the flight. That sucked!
I was thrown in jail in Mombasa Kenya for breaking a phone in the airport. They held me for about 9 hours, after which I faked an asthma attack and they took me back to the airport and threw me out of the car. I don't even have asthma!
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