Off we go....
There was a time when I hated to travel. That was followed
by a time when I loved it. These days I fall somewhere in between.
We’re off on our annual trip to Europe, this time starting
in Paris, courtesy of United Airlines frequent flyer miles and ending in
Madrid. Courtesy of American Airlines miles. How we arrived at this non-cost
adventure is a long tale of smart credit card choices, solar panels and dozens
of trips to the grocery store and gas station. Plus a few tens of thousands of
miles left over from the good old days of business travel. They add up, and
sometimes the result is a nice ticket to somewhere.
We’re making a grand tour this time around, France, and
multiple stops in Spain. We timed it well to coincide with the first few days
of the horse fair in Sevilla, so we’ll get to enjoy that a second time. All in
all, a nice chance to fly some miles and ride some trains.
One thing that wears me to a little nub each time is the
planning. And this one was a doozy. Two different airlines, 5 train
connections, 4 apartments, and all the associated times and deposits and
contacts. While I consider myself pretty good at this, keeping it all together is
a challenge. Where do you start? Planes or houses? The answer is both – find some
decent apartment options (in itself a slog) and then look at flights. If you
can find the seats you want, rush back and put a deposit on the apartment
before finalizing the flights. It’s a juggling act and sometimes mistakes get
made (like the 6-hour layover at Dulles that resulted in missing our Dublin
connection by 50 minutes.) But if you’re diligent, some brainpower and a good
Excel spreadsheet can bring it all into perspective.
But make sure you call your credit card first because it’s a
pain in the neck to go through the train booking process on Renfe and get
denied in the last step.
I completed to process back around my birthday in early
February and put everything aside until now. Well, outside of some deposits and
such (another story in itself, trying to book rent in France via a VPN from Mexico
that resulted in my Paypal account being seized for fraud.) We pretty much sat
back and waited for our departure date to arrive, until this past Tuesday
morning when all hell broke loose in Belgium. Of course, following the horror
in Paris last November, and watching the ISIS new releases about re-capturing
the Caliphate of Cordoba in Spain, we thought about wading into this. The
attack in Istanbul last month had taken that place off our wish-list, and we’ve
seriously dithered about finding the time to ferry across the Med to Tangier
from Spain. But this turmoil was too abstract to have a genuine impact. And now
it’s close and real. But we considered our options and decided we wanted to
keep on going with the understanding that perhaps, they’ve got things better
under control.
So today we hopped on the small regional jet to Chicago, had
our first tastes of people watching and made our way to the United Club to wait
for our trans-Atlantic. Arriving tomorrow in Paris, a bit later than normal (which
is nice) and looking forward to a week of taking in the sites. In other words,
I’m back to loving travel the way I did, not so very long ago.
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