A day late and a (few thousand) dollar(s) short
January 11, 2008 | Airlines,Blogging,Norway,Traveling,Vacation
But, hey, I’m back! (And, yeah, that’s what it looked like up there. A lot.)
First off, thank you, thank you, thank you to all the incredible guest bloggers for keeping the blogfires burning while I was gone!
I have a ton of photographs to go through, bags to unpack and boxes of Christmas gifts yet to open. I also have massive blog updates to do. In the meantime, here’s an update.
- The good: The travel to our destination went surprisingly well.
- The bad: That’s the last thing to go “surprisingly well.”
- The ugly: Puking (and other unmentionables) started the day after we arrived and ended, oh, about two weeks later after three trips to the on-call doctor and one overnight stay at the hospital for IV fluids and attacking every, single one of us and then some.
- The travel from our destination? FUBAR.
- Missed the overseas flight — even though we called ahead to the airline (which rhymes with Rocksuckernental) to tell them our first flight was delayed and sprinted the entire length of the airport — by literally five minutes.
- The plane was still there. They just wouldn’t let us board. So we watched it leave with 12 empty seats, five of which were ours, paid in full.
- Haris the Gatekeeper said our only option was to show up the next morning and wait on “standby.” Or we could buy new tickets, even though that wouldn’t guarantee our seats. Or we could check out other options with other airlines. And, oh yeah, if that didn’t work out, he would be “happy” to see us again the next morning. (I didn’t tell him where I would be “happy” to see him … you know, burning and gnashing teeth and all.)
- We spent the next several hours checking our nonexistent options. I will never go to Vegas. (I may be unlucky, but I’m not brain-dead.) Here’s what happened.
- New tickets with no guarantees — $6,000
- Hotel room with one bed, one crib and five bodies — $300
- Three hot dogs, an order of fries, some yogurt and juice from the airport kiosk — $50 (instead of $175 for five burgers and no drinks at the hotel)
- Less than an hour on the Internet to check in and print boarding passes (without which I am certain we’d still be wandering the Oslo airport) — $30
- 1 child with a fever, 3 weeks in Winter Wonderland with no snow and Haris telling us the next morning that we “probably would have been fine on standby” (meaning we gambled away the equivalent of, oh, about two months of his annual salary) and the fact that I let him walk away from me and continue breathing — priceless
- How long before I do this again? Infinity. As we said from the security of our seats in the air, “Buh-bye, Oslo. See ya NEVER!”
Posted by Becky @ 6:14 pm
January 11th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Welcome home!
January 12th, 2008 at 11:47 am
I enjoyed your guests! I am really glad you are home and back to your blog space.
January 12th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Welcome back! Hope you’re all feeling better soon.
January 12th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Damn. But welcome home.
January 12th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Sorry that it all went so badly, Becky… but glad that you are back and whole (well, except for your bank account).
GF
January 12th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Wow, sounds like quite the holiday adventure….glad to see you back and not stranded in an airport!
January 14th, 2008 at 12:22 am
Good lord. That sucks.
January 14th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Welcome back… hope we didn’t leave the place in TOO much of a mess for you.
January 14th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Wow.
OMG.
Holy mother of god.
That’s a nightmare. Pure and simple. May the rest of your year be blissful in comparison.
January 16th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Welcome back and sorry Scandinavia took so shitty care of you. I guess visiting Sweden it out of the question now…. :-)) Your trip almost sounds like our last trip to Mexico which included two kids with severe diarrhea, a broken eardrum, not sleeping, etc, ( see here http://www.adventuredad.com/archives/a-24-hour-travel-adventure/ )
But you know what they say, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger…… Very sorry to hear about the $6000. That hurts just reading about it.
AD
January 17th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
I guess I should confess. I bought the tickets.
January 30th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
[…] A day late and a (few thousand) dollar(s) short […]
February 7th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
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February 12th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
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