Since I started out talking about all the anxiety I get on transfer days when traveling, I thought I’d close out my vacation stories with a list of the things that had me sweating:
1. Made it to the Cincy airport fine…no issues in NYC…landed in Barcelona, and our private driver was nowhere to be seen.
Walked up and down the row of drivers with their placards, up and down, a third time, nothing for us.
MrsT dug out the local phone number for the service, but had trouble dialing and getting connected, so I had a couple of tries at it and just as someone picked up the phone…there he was. He’d been standing there the whole time, just had the wrong name on his paper.
That wasted 30 minutes or so, sheer terror, but the rest of the night went fine. Funny end of that one - we each tipped the driver separately, so I’m sure he was thrilled.
2. Transfer from hotel to ship was easy. Our first shore excursion, though, they never gave me a ticket, just MrsT, so we assumed we were both on the same ticket, so when we went to leave the ship, that caused some panic.
3. Genoa - they bumped up the departure time for that shore excursion, but we didn’t know, so when we went down to check in to leave, they were already loaded and about to pull out, so we got scolded for that.
4. Corfu - just the earlier confusion at being kidnapped for seven hours.
5. Got separated from the tour guide for several minutes in Taormina because it was ridiculously crowded and he was panicking about the crowd size himself.
6. Naples - after my tour ended, the tour guide said that anyone wanting to stay in town, that was fine, but for anyone wanting to head back to the ship, he’d walk us back, and I opted to go back to the ship. I turned around for just a couple of minutes, seeing if there was a bank where we were, and the guide had hot-footed it out and I lost him.
I worked my own way back to the shop and caught up to him exactly at the same time he was saying goodbye to the other people, so that was a little stressful. I asked him if there was a bank nearby and he said, “Yeah…over there,” and sort of half-assedly waved off in a general direction. That wasted a bunch of time, and I just ended up using my phone to find a bank, which is what I should have done in the first place, so that’s on me.
7. Getting off the ship and transferring to a hotel in Rome - I already covered the exercise in futility that was, but our driver was waiting just off the gangway, so the rest of the day went off fine, as did our second day in Rome, and our journey to the airport the morning after that.
8. Got on the plane in Rome and…sat. For about 45 minutes, we had to wait on other aircraft to take off, because of high winds. Everyone had to take off in a certain direction. That wasn’t fun.
9. That delayed us into NYC, and Delta went ahead and booked us on a morning flight, even though our original flight for that evening was only delayed, not cancelled, so MrsT had to really scramble to get our seats back before they assigned them to someone else. More stress!
10. Made it to Cincy, finally. Then, we couldn’t find the long-term parking slip we had, showing where the car was parked. We knew where we were parked, physically, but we didn’t know the name of the lot, so we had to google that, so we could get on the right shuttle. Fine, got that sorted.
11. The long-term lot installed new ticketing machines just before we left, and instead of a paper ticket showing your punch-in time, you have to stick in a credit card, it reads it, then use the same card when you exit.
We have one metal credit card, and that’s the one we used - I even told MrsT: “Remember, metal ticket machine=metal card. That’s how we’ll remember.”
With all the delays, we’d been up something like 20 hours at that point, and just wanted to get home. We got the car, headed for the exit…”Insert same credit card as used when entering…,” did that…”This card cannot be used…Insert same credit card as used when entering…”
Automated lot, so no attendant. Great…
Got out all our credit cards, went back, tried them one after the other, same response - ”Insert same credit card as used when entering…”. ARRRGHH!!!
They had a phone number to call, called that, took 12 rings for someone to pick up, and then I ran through all our credit cards with her, and…it was the metal card, first one I tried, that was the right card.
“Go back and try it again, I’ll see it pop up here.”
Went back, stuck it in again, nothing.
“Jiggle it a little.”
Jiggled it a little, nothing.
“Ok, hold on…now jiggle it again.”
Jiggled it again, it worked. Son of a bi…!
“Yeah, sometimes, ya jus’ gotta try a few times. Technology, huh?”
That took a good 30 minutes to escape.
So there you go - several things that pegged the ol’ Anxiety-O-Meter up to 11.
and
at the same time.
!” feeling when something goes wrong.