Well the week of transition is drawing to a close. After the hullaballo of getting out of the house and down to VA, we finally got Buddy to the pet travel company (can’t recommend Pender Air highly enough!) while we ran our last few errands and headed to the airport ourselves. For some reason, our TSA Precheck didn’t come through as it usually does with Global Entry so I had to take off my shoes for the first time in forever – oh the shock! But we had plenty of time and ended up in the Lufthansa lounge celebrating with double G&Ts and real food (Frank says chicken schnitzel was pretty good!). Then to our upgraded first class seats for the short hop to JFK. We got to the gate and they were volunteering to check bags to your final desitination for free. Yay! I would have happily checked all the bags but Delta does draw the line at how many bags you can check before charging you. Apparently the combination of first class upgrade and the Delta AmEx card puts that limit at 3. So I gladly took that tag and left the bag on the end of the jet bridge. What happened to it after that became quite the mystery.
The domestic leg was uneventful and we had lots of time to change terminals and get to our flight to EDI. I spent some time chatting with the lovely retired gentleman from Boise across the aisle from me who was going to visit his daughter who married a Scot and was living in Falkirk. Then after a passable meal and better-than-mediocre wine, I actually managed to get 3 full hours of sleep! (Frank says I was actually snoring but who would believe that!) The immigration folks didn’t seem interested in my work visa (!) so we wandered to the baggage claim where our 6 bags checked in Dulles were in the first bunch off the plane. What was missing? The gate checked bad. The Delta app indicated that it was still in JFK and would be on a flight to Amsterdam first thing in the morning. ARRRRGGGGHGHHH
So I went to the lost baggage office – a very small window in the baggage area – to find not a soul in site. Instead there was a sign that says most airlines lost baggage were being handled by Swissport and please scan this QR code to file your log bag report. Which I did. And the app told me that I had to call Delta. Which I did. And the person on the other end of the phone told me to report it to the office. Which I could not. When I tried to explain that, she hung up on me! Rude! While I had gotten about 3 hours of sleep, I was still not my perky lovable self so you can imagine how this went over. Meanwhile, Frank was arguing with Avis (whom we always get good service from!) about the “upgrade” they were giving us that we didn’t want – mostly because we weren’t convinced that VW Golf would take all the cases that had managed to arrive. Of course they didn’t have anything else besides a 7 seat Mercedes van – at an extra £60/day. Um, no. We had a wonderful friend waiting to help us get the cases to Aberdeen if necessary and that was the only reason we needed the larger car so there was no way on this earth I was paying an extra £1300 for that. A little more discussion found a car of the right size for an additional £15/day and would actually take all the cases and be able to park in a normal parking space. So we were set.
Off to Stirling to pick up my BRP (Biometric Resident Permit – like a green card) and an old iPhone from Frank’s brother. A quick stop for lunch in Perth and we finally made it to Aberdeen in the early afternoon. We got the tour of the flat – which didn’t take long because it is very SMALL – and started to unpack. And that’s when we realized that all the “downsizing” we thought we had done was not going to be enough. We quickly ran out of hangers and drawer space. The first was easily remedied; the second will take some creativity. We had a quick dinner and managed to stay awake until all of 8:30pm!
A good nights sleep was just what the doctor ordered and then we had one day to prepare for Buddy to arrive. He landed in Manchester at 8:30 am and then got his doggy limo for the 6 hour trip north – arriving about 24 hours after us. It was so nice to have him arrive safe and sound! Of course he is very confused and doesn’t understand where his toys are or why he can’t sleep on the bed and what is all this nonsense about not barking? But he gets lots of rides in the car and now that we’ve customized our flat just a bit, it is feeling more like home. Of course it will be a while before we are really settled but stay tuned and we’ll tell you all about it. 🙂
PS. Yes, the errant bag arrived safe and sound (and completely drenched!) several hours after Buddy did. Not sure why it needed to make a pit stop in Amsterdam but some things will remain a mystery…..