Traveling to Croatia

Well it is going to be a full day of travel.  The plane is to fly from Victoria to Seattle to Vancouver to Munich to Trieste Italy.  Don't ask why we chose this route.  Let's just say that the airline rate structures are a bit byzantine and leave it at that.  The flight to Seattle was uneventful.  The trip through customs at the Seattle airport took longer than the flight.  Even though we were only connecting through the U.S. for a connection back into Canada we had to go through the full customs thing.  Fine.  Whatever.

The flight from Seattle to Vancouver was also uneventful.  A little light rain but nothing to get excited about..  But when we get to Vancouver we can't get off the plane.  Apparently there is a risk of lightning so they pulled in all the ground crews and all planes are either stuck at the gate or stranded on the tarmac.  We had planned what seemed like a reasonable lay over, but it quickly became apparent -- not enough.  After setting for two hours on the tarmac we were finally able to get off the plane.  The good news is that our connecting flight couldn't move either so we were able to make the flight to Munich.  But since that flight was 3 hours late, our connecting flight to Trieste was just a bad dream.

So we made it to Munich.  It is a very nice airport -- and we got to see a lot of it.  Fortunately we were able to catch the last flight to Trieste that day, and if everything went well than we could catch the last bus in to our hotel and no real harm done by our little escapade.  So after 5 or 6 hours in Munich we were on our way to Trieste.  Nice flight only took about an hour.  Great we are on a roll.  Go to pick up our bags.  You guessed it -- no bags.  So after filling out the necessary forms we ran for the last buss into town before they closed the airport but we did make it and were in bed by 1:00.

Next day we were up at 6:30 in order to do what we could to track down the bags before our shuttle to Pula, Croatia.  By morning they still had no idea where the bags are.  Apparently Lufthansa doesn't believe in computerize bag tracking.  Worse yet Lufthansa doesn't doesn't believe in customer service.  There approach is don't call us we'll call you.  All you can do is talk to a very uninformative recording until they want to talk to you.  We had given them Alen's (our tour guide) phone number and he did finally receive a call after about 24 hours.  They had found the bags still in Vancouver.  Said they would ship them our that night and they would be in Trieste first thing the morning.  Alen was extremely helpful and agreed to loan us a couple of bicycles for the day.

Next day was a nice day except that Valerie couldn't really ride a single because of her wrist (that was freshly out of the cast) so she was only able to ride for part of the day.  We were expecting a call from Lufthansa all day.  Nothing,  Oh well it is probably at the hotel waiting for us.  Nothing.  The usual nonsense with Lufthansa.  But thank god for Alen.  He was finally able to get around their automated system and talk to a human at the Trieste airport.  Yes the bags were there.  Oh were we supposed to do something with them?  Oh we'll get on that first thing tomorrow, it is too late to get a courier today!  arrgh!  Fortunately they finally agreed that they could get a courier to drive it as far as the border that night.  So Alen drove the the border met the courier and then brought the luggage to our hotel.

So finally we had our lovely bicycle.  Granted it was still in pieces and it was 9:00 at night.  But what the heck, we still had our bicycle.  I had given up on arriving and had had a couple of beers.  I quickly discovered that really doesn't make the assembly go faster.   But by 11:30 we had a real functioning bicycle.  A couple of test rides and a couple of adjustments in the morning and we were good to go. 

Happiness is having your own bicycle.