Here we go again! Today was another magical day spent attempting to book flights. Aer Lingus is a airline that desperately does not want to be used. How can some people book tickets the same day they take off? How do they not bite their nails to a nub? Mine are certainly suffering from this whole ordeal and my trip is 2 months away! I've eaten both thumbnails down to the skin and we still have one more flight to book. Outstanding.
We do only have one more flight left to book because we did actually manage to book our flight from Ireland to Paris. This has been a several day process of cards being rejected and codes getting sent to alternate phones, so we opted to just buy from a different site which worked, but came with it's own conundrums. There's a whole process to confirm you flight within 24 hours or you pay a $10 fee. So we, naturally, wanted to confirm right away! Easy-peasy, right? Wrong. We set up our account after we booked the flight, which meant the flight wasn't connected to the account at all. All good, they plan for that and say to just use your email to handle the flight. That's great and all, but the email thing didn't really work as expected. The 'Confirm Flight' button in the email sent us to a webpage that didn't exist. Hence more nail biting. Like I said, this airline does not want to be used. Technically the initial issues were the fault of the credit card company, who were declining the payment because, apparently, booking 2 thousand dollar flights from 2 different airlines and 2 AirBnB's in foriegn countries count as uncharacteristic purchases. Who knew! It was also the issue of the site we were using, which was a third party site that demanded a security code that was sent to the phone attached to the card which was a hassle specifically for us, but who doesn't wanna play phone tag over the course of three days? So, technically, not Aer Lingus' fault, but I need someone to officially blame and they're the easiest target, so that's just how it's gotta be.
We managed to locate the correct confirmation page eventually through some serious scouting and that has officially been handled. We are still not 100% set though because we need transportation from France to Portugal. My mother is pushing for us to take the train, and to be fair it sounds fun. I've never been on a long-term train ride before and it sounds like a hoot, but there's a snafu. We already paid for the AirBnB's for France and Portugal with the assumption that we would be flying in. By plane it takes an hour or so to get between the countries. By train it takes 20 hours. We'd never make our Portugal reservation in time with that kind of travel time. Still, she wants us to just tell the AirBnB person (do they have a title?) that we're going to be a day late and that we'll still pay for the night. It was on $26 dollars a night, but once again, we're 'poor people travelers' and $26 dollars is $26 dollars. That's a lot of Dollar Tree candles-worth of money.
Tomorrow is meant to be dedicated to figuring out the final leg of the flight plans, something which never should have taken this long to begin with but that's not really anyone's fault but The Fates. This is our first time doing something like this, we're going to have plenty of issues, make lots of mistakes, and bite down plenty of nails. In a way, the planning and prepping is an adventure all on it's own. No one ever said adventurous stuff had to be fun, just an unusual and potentially hazardous experience. My thumbs would count this as both.
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