I like the idea of vacations and being on them much more than the act of planning a vacation. This most recent one was supposed to be easy, Spain and Portugal. The challenge was the lack of direct flights, the expense, and even more expense if we didn’t do a round trip. So we decided to add 1 more stop in Paris to save money and give us a chance to go to one of our favorite vacation spots.
So we added Paris. Then we needed to decide if we wanted to go to Spain or Portugal first. There were 4 cities we wanted to see. They were Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, and Porto. We could fly to the countries and take trains in between the cities.
When we started to feel like it was too much, we dropped Porto from the list and kept the other 3. Then throw in the wrench. I was granted to opportunity to go to a conference in England while we were on vacation. A few changes of bookings and Barcelona got dropped and Manchester was added.
The next challenge was finding a flight from Lisbon to Manchester. After an unsuccessful search, we figured out we could take a train to Porto and get to Manchester that way. Whew!
Planes were on time, train was on time, but the one other sticky point (other than being nervous the hurricane was going to keep us from leaving Orlando) was now that Norwegian Air closed up shop, direct flights to Paris are rare and expensive. Add in paying with points and you end up on 5 flights to get to Paris and back.
So I am now on flight 7 as I write about all of this crazy and I hope we stay on schedule and I don’t curse it by saying all has gone well.
Next trip will be simpler and have way less moves, but all in all, we loved every bit of it. Except maybe the lack of air conditioning in a couple of places and the double landing with Ryan Air.
More to come.
By the way, Eddie took 2 additional round trips by train while I was at the conference in Manchester.
Update- I cursed it. Will share in another post after we get home. Flight 9 is in the wings…
Swimming Upstream 