Last November I had a mild maternal freak-out. Emma was moving across the country, and Elizabeth was a mere few months away from reaching that magic age of 18 that proclaims adulthood. I decided that distracting myself by looking at possible trips abroad would be how I was going to cope with this particular near meltdown. But looking at those trips made me realize that it was entirely doable to go as a family. In the summer before Emma's senior year, we took a family trip to Kauai. We could do a similar thing and take the family to Ireland during the Spring Break of Elizabeth's senior year. I have been carefully adding to my savings account, aptly named "Travel Fund," for a while and it was sizable.
So, we bought plane tickets and made a rental car reservation. It was really going to happen!
Over the next two months I researched places in Ireland I wanted to go. Some of the places would be repeats of the trip Ryan and I did in 2017 to share with the girls, and others would be new to us as well. We made reservations of Airbnbs around the southern region, and two hotel nights in Dublin- the night after we arrived and the night before we leave. I bought two plug adapters with enough outlets to charge everyone's phones every night. Found the neck pillows. I made lists. Made plans. Made a calendar. Made back up plans depending on the weather. Got someone to feed our animals. I even purchased Ryan a new Jansport backpack to replace his 15+ year old one. (I searched for a backpack nearly exactly the same as the one I wanted to replace. Ryan doesn't like change once he finds something that works. So I bought him the backpack and didn't tell him about it until he was faced with the replacement in real life and he knew we could send it back. Once the backpack was in hand, he totally was on board with having a new, functioning bag.) We were set to leave the day after Ryan got out for Spring Break. (This was different for him versus the kids because of Parent Teacher Conferences at the elementary school level. Ryan had an extra day past when the kids were done.) And most of all, we were excited and mostly packed!
26 hours before we were due to leave, I got a text update from British Airways that our flight to Dublin was canceled.
Cue spiraling freak out.
I desperately tried to reach Ryan and of course he was busy. I logged into Travelocity and sure enough, the flight had gone kaput due to the London airport workers strike. We had wrongly booked a trip with a London lay-over because it was cheaper than a direct flight. Travelocity had a chat feature to contact them, which I started. It took a long while to make it from computer generated responses to an actual person. I had finally gotten a hold of Ryan and he understood the gravity of the situation and came home so we could talk because it was around lunch time. Eventually I was transferred to a call with a thickly accented real-life person, which was not as helpful as I had hoped. The best they could offer was a flight that was over 24 hours and routed us through Istanbul.
Seriously?
And if that wasn't enough, if I canceled the flight then all of the plans booked through Travelocity were also canceled. Not that it mattered regarding the hotel stays because those were non-refundable.
The computer chat-turned-phone call had gone on a long time. Ryan had returned to work and when things got interesting, I called him on Annie and Maddie's phone so I wouldn't have to make all of the hard decisions alone. And we made the hard decision to pull the plug on the whole thing. For whatever reason, Travelocity couldn't contrive of any way to make this trip happen without doubling the price and shortening the stay. They said all of the good flights were booked. To say that I was sick to my stomach and disappointed would be an understatement. Multiply that by three teenaged girls and you might understand how we were feeling. I cried while canceling our Airbnb stays. This whole sad process had sucked a solid 3 hours out of my day.
Once Ryan got home for the evening we talked about what we could do with our Spring Break. What kinds of activities could be dream up? We could surely try and resusitate something. Ryan gave each of us a pencil and paper and told us to think of ideas of things to do. Annie and Maddie had zero things written on their papers. If we couldn't go to Ireland, there was not a dang thing in this world that could replace it. No bowling, no Tulip Festival, no eating at restuarants could make up a fraction of what we were missing. We talked about when we could rebook the trip. Ryan was unwilling to miss more than a day of work at a time, and Elizabeth needed to get a job at least by the end of her senior year which would prohibit a summer trip. Ultimately, we figured out that if we wanted a family trip then we needed to just do it. The best prices I could find had us leaving 3 days later than Friday. It was more, much more, than we had originally planned. But it was now or never.
So we bought new tickets- ones that were straight from Seattle to Dublin. Reserved another rental car. And prayed I could find places to stay this close to the trip. We got everything booked over the next 24 hours.
I was only cautiously optimistic about the upcoming trip. I kept feeling like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop and we would really be out of more money because a lot of those places I booked were non-refundable. But on the plus side, we could watch all 5 sessions of General Conference at home, and on Friday- attend a baptism and host the missionaries, the new member, and another family for dinner. 'Cause why not. We were only supposed to be winging our way to Ireland then.
Finally Monday rolled around. We were all packed early and then waited around, watching tv until it was time to leave. Our flight left Seattle at 6:50 pm and it is a 3 hour drive to the airport. There was no reason to leave until after lunch. At the last moment as we were loading our bags into the car, my van had a low tire warning come up. Ryan had just filled up the tires that morning, so to have a low tire again so soon was not promising. He filled the tire up again and then loaded our air compressor into the back of the van, then away we went. Once at SeaTac, there literally were no spaces open at our favorite car park. The attendent said she didn't know of any car park that had space. (NOOOO!!! This trip must be cursed!) This was news to us as we had never had an issue before; not that we take many trips... I guess we looked pathetic enough, because the lady had us pull over to the side and she checked reservations. There was someone who hadn't shown up and she kindly let us go in. I was worried that someone might recind that offer all the way until we got dropped off at the airport. (Can they do that?)
We took the escalaters down to go get our passports checked and tickets printed. I was feeling semi-confident at this point that we were really going to Ireland. What I failed to notice was that one of my shoes had come untied. One of my shoe laces got stuck in the escalator and I did not realize this until I was trying to get off and I couldn't. This boat was going down. I had visions of the Escalator Monster eating my shoe and then my leg, and then we really couldn't go because I would be maimed... etc. etc. Maybe I was feeling a little melodramatic. I was able to extract my shoe lace with only a little trouble. Ryan didn't even notice I had gone down.
We had a solid half hour wait to go through security. But in the end, we were able to board and take off, and it was finally real. We were going to Ireland! Wahoo!
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