I took my own weekly advice and went on a family vacation. I got back in the office yesterday after almost two weeks away. We had a wonderful time visiting friends in Italy, but I did want to share with you some of the unexpected surprises that we encountered along the way, and how we made the best of things.
We were scheduled to fly to Europe on the evening of Friday, November 3rd. I received a text from the airline on Tuesday, October 31st saying that our flight had been cancelled. Now what? I’m the person I tell you to call when things like this happen. I jumped on the phone to the travel professional help desk withthe airline and avoided the long hold times that the airlines are famous for. Within minutes my flight was rebooked for Thursday, instead of Friday and we had an extra day of vacation on the books.Unfortunately, it also meant that I had one less day to get my family ready to leave for vacation.
We had an easy drive to the airport for our flight and arrived in London for our connection to Rome in a very thick fog. This meant that most flights from London were cancelled for the remainder of the day. With another stroke of luck I was able to talk my way into the First Class service line. This meant that there were only 4 travelers infront of us waiting for a representative, as opposed to the hundreds of travelers waiting in the economy line. Even with the short line it was still an hour before we reached a representative and had a new plan. She tried several different routes to get us to Italy that day, but none would work.
We decided to make the best of it and stay in London overnight. As light packers we had all of our bags with us as carry on instead of checked baggage so we were prepared. The airline booked our hotel, gave us vouchers for breakfast, lunch and dinner for all three of us and round trip transportation vouchers to get from the airport to the hotel and back.
The best decision we made was to choose an afternoon flight the next day to get to Rome, rather than the earliest available flight. By choosing a later flight we had the opportunity to sleep in the next morning and avoid a ton of jetlag!
We checked into the hotel, dropped our bags, freshened up and hopped in an Uber to explore London. Sure, we could have just crashed at the hotel and complained about the fog and the cancelled flight, but why? The fog lifted and we had a lovely day walking the streets of London from Trafalgar Square past Buckingham Palace and then to Harrod’s department store, which was completely decked out for Christmas.
The next morning, instead of setting an alarm for 3am to make a 7am flight we slept in, had a lovey breakfast at the hotel (using our voucher) and arrived at the airport just before 10am for our flight to Rome.
The weather was a bit rainy, but luckily there was no fog in sight. We arrived in Rome on schedule. Ironically, exactly on our original schedule! We then took the train to Naples and spent a lovely week along the coast before returning to Rome for a few days at the end of the trip. I’ll share more in the coming weeks about why we decided to concetrate so much time along the coast instead of “seeing all of Italy” in the 10 days we were gone. We had a lovely trip that easily could have been sent off kilter by the cancelled flights we encountered at the beginning, but we made the best of it and have some wonderful memories.
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