Dublin, Ireland

So, I had about 250,000 frequent flier miles. Nina has 190,000 miles. Time to use them before we can’t get around anymore. We decided to go to Ireland for a couple of weeks, pop over to Paris for a few days, and then head back home, a total of 21 days.

Everything was booked without an issue. We would leave on Sept 11th and return on Oct 2nd.

I scheduled a Lyft ride to take us to the airport early Wednesday morning. It was accepted. I got a text message saying that Christian was 10 minutes away. We went outside with luggage. No one came. Then the Lyft app said they were looking for a nearby driver. When we were down to 2 1/2 hours before the flight I finally cancelled and we drove ourselves to the airport. I complained on Twitter (that’s where Lyft does their customer service) and a few hours learned from them that the driver cancelled the ride and they couldn’t find another driver at that hour. Their solution? Ban that driver from my account. He’ll never be assigned to me again. Whopee. Never mind that mInd that I’m now paying $230 to park instead of $95.00 for the ride.

Our flight schedule was from Salt Lake to Los Angeles, short layover, then fly to Boston and another short layover. Finally from Boston to Dublin. When we arrived at LAX, I received. Message that we’d been rerouted because equipment issues ln LAX were delaying the flight to Boston and we would miss the fight to Dublin.

The new routing was LAX to CDG (Charles DeGaul), an 11-hour flight, than a 5 1/2 hour layover, and finally fly into Dublin. In addition, the flight was fully booked and we were in middle seats and not even together. It was a lousy flight. We finally arrived in Dublin at 4:30pm on Thursday instead of 8:30am on the original schedule. Somewhere along the way our checked luggage got left behind. We’d been underway for 30 hours and would be wearing the same clothes for at least another day.

Nothing had been delivered when we got up Friday morning. So we went sightseeing for the day. When we got back to the hotel about 7pm, still no delivery. The only way to check was online as the baggage check number was constantly busy. So we took a taxi to a nearby Tesco (kind of like a Walmart or a Target) and bought some clothes and toiletries. I have trip insurance so that would be (mostly) reimbursed. We got back to the hotel and our luggage was there.

Today (Saturday) we went back to Tesco and returned most of it. Life is good. I’ll write about what we’ve been doing otherwise in the next post.

L