The Portugal Saga, Part IV: Home Again

[teendoc]

Originally published at Welcome To The Dollhouse. You can comment here or there.


h heaven…just the day before I was all chillaxed on the beach. Now it was time to pack up, turn around, and go back home. Suck much?

Remember the trouble we had with good ol’ Megatur, the company that we had arranged to do our airport/hotel transfers when we arrived in Faro. Somehow they never received our flight information and thus didn’t have us on the list to pick up after our fun transatlantic journey. Well in order to avoid this unfortunate recurrence, I spent Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of our vacation working with the concierge in an attempt to contact them about our return. Oh yeah…but when every single phone number listed on the confirmation sheet is no longer working, reaching them becomes a little bit challenging. But thanks to the perseverance of the nice concierge, on Friday afternoon, she made contact.

Megatur planned for a 7 AM pickup for our flight which departed at 9:40 AM. Considering that we were a 45 minute drive away from the airport and had to check in our 5 million bags and go through security I worried that the timing was a little tight. Yet, hey, they must know what they’re doing right? My anxiety worsened on Friday evening when we received a fax from Megatur letting us know that they would be picking us up at 7:30 in the morning, not 7 AM. Wasn’t this cutting things more than a little too fine? Gulp!

The first priority of this return trip was to pack more reasonably. The giant 22 inch carry-on bag was not of much use to me when it was wedged and unreachable in the overhead compartment. This time, I said to myself, I would do it differently. This time I would have everything we needed for Jubby within reach. To this end, I purchased a cute (but very overpriced) Club Med carry-on bag that was actually a carry on and not a small suitcase. (I also bought the matching tote bag and messenger bag. WTH, they were cute, after all!) Unfortunately, this meant that when we added the old carry on and our box of wine to the tally, we were now checking 7 items, somewhat of a ridiculous amount for three people who’d been away for a week.

We thought we were doing very well with our packing (despite Zara’s insistence on removing the items we had placed in the suitcases) until the bellman arrived at 7:15 and we found that we still had not closed all the bags he was to take. We hastily closed everything (only losing Jubby in the hallway once), then managed to throw together our carry-ons, get Jubby in her GoGo Kidz/car seat contraption and head out.

Now I have to digress for just a minute here. One thing I can say about my dear AdoringHusband is that he knows nothing of the word speed. As my late mother would say, “he has two speeds, slow and stop.” This background is important for what happened next. We exited the elevator and I began walking quickly so that I could check out and get to the airport shuttle. I was aware of someone walking very closely at my heels. This startled me because I hadn’t seen anybody else come off the stairwell and there was no one else on the elevator with me and AdoringHusband, so where did this fast walking person come from? I turned around and almost fell over with shock. There right behind me was AdoringHusband walking with a speed that I had never seen in the seven years that I have known him. I didn’t know that his legs actually moved that fast! Wonder of wonders. For some reason, he didn’t think my complimenting him on his alacrity was a real compliment.

I went to the desk to check out while AdoringHusband got Jubby secured into what I thought would be be small transport van that was taking us back to the airport. Yet after my dawdling at after realizing that I had spent €658 on incidentals at an all-inclusive resort (yikes!), I made my way outside and discovered that a ginormous bus filled with people was waiting for me in order to leave for the airport.

The ride back to the airport happily, was uneventful. Yet I began to get that anxious feeling start up in my stomach that told me I was back on the anxiety train. Would we make our flight? What about our connections? What snafus were ahead for us? Little did I know what actually would await us.

We ended up needing two luggage carts to handle all of our baggage. Again, not so smart. I chose what seemed to be the fastest moving line, but of course as is typical with me, I am cursed with bad line selection karma. The line I choose moves fast just until I get into it. This time was no exception. I don’t know what was going on with the check-in guy for our line, but it seemed that almost every passenger required him to pick up the phone and call somebody to assist with the situation. This was not a good sign. In addition, I had to prevent my dear husband from attacking a man who he assured me was attempting to push his luggage cart into Jubby as she sat in her car seat/GoGo Kidz carrier contraption. All I know is that I had to defuse the situation by moving Jubby away from the man’s cart and keeping AdoringHusband from attempting to use the patented stare of death to kill the man.

Eventually we managed to make it to the slow check-in guy. I handed him our tickets. He looked at them. He asked where we were flying to. I said, “Philadelphia.” Then he reached for the phone. I was very very unhappy.

After he got off the phone, he said something about having too many bags. I said that I would pay for the extra bags. He said, “You paid for the bags?” To which I replied, “I’ll pay for the bags.” This seemed to satisfy him and no mention of paying for bags was heard again. Then he tried to put a bag tag on Jubby’s car seat. We explained that it would be going into the plane and thus didn’t need a tag. He said it still needed one. Hell, by this point, I would have plastered myself in baggage tags if it would have helped him move a little faster! It was 9:15 already! He then pointed us toward another conveyor belt where we had to take the stroller and the wine box. “Fragile,” he explained. “Arrgh!” we exclaimed as we ran over there and dropped them with the laconic agent.

We made as valiant a dash as we could to the security line and managed to get through our screening relatively quickly despite my continued setting off the alarm and needing a manual patdown. We ran through the terminal forgetting that we would have to go through passport control again. The passport control guy wanted to make chit chat and I was like, we gotta go! We made it to the gate just as they had started boarding the bus transports to take us to the plane. Phew, I thought. We made it and the worst is over. Yeah right.

This time I made AdoringHusband responsible for wrestling with the Car Seat of Concussions. As is typical for him, he didn’t see why I made such a big deal about carrying the seat. I wanted him to experience it firsthand. I don’t think he realized it, but he came very close to braining people several times. The looks he was getting! One man was on the verge of pulling his wife out of harms way. I’m telling you that seat is dangerous!

Luckily Jubby behaved fairly well on the flight to Dublin. AdoringHusband and I actually got to eat some breakfast while she slept in her car seat. The funny thing was, this Aer Lingus flight was filled with children. Portugal must be the place that Irish vacationers go with their kids. There was so much crying and shrieking and whining that had Jubby decided to act up she would’ve fit in with the chorus. She woke up about an hour before we landed in Dublin, ate some goldfish, drank juice and didn’t try too hard to climb under her seat.

The big problem was…time. We left Faro late and arrived in Dublin late. Why I thought a two-hour connection would be doable I do not know. What I didn’t know at the time is that Dublin is not a place one should ever connect through if at all humanly possible. Dublin Airport is an incredibly busy airport. Also, we were told, it is a place that a lot of people emigrate from so customs and security are a lot tighter. It is one of two airports in Europe that does have US Customs preclearance prior to boarding the plane. All that means is that were 15 more layers of rigmarole required to get through the Dublin Airport than any other airport in Europe that I’ve encountered.

Our plane arrived about 40 minutes late. It also taxied to a gate in the farthest, most remote part of the airport (naturally). When we managed to deplane and realized that we were miles away from where we needed to be and had no boarding passes for our connection and no time to get them, I think that panic was an inadequate word for what we felt.

The there was the GoGo Kidz problem. This GoGo Babyz Kidz Travelmate Car Seat was supposed to make Travels with Toddler much, much easier. Yet somewhere along our travels to Portugal I must’ve disassembled the darn thing improperly because the damn thing never hooked right or simply again. It is supposed to me a matter of seconds to place the car seat and secure it. Well, something went drastically wrong with ours. So wrong that it currently sits hidden in the garage so that we don’t have to look at it again. But back to the story. We deplane in Dublin and the panic sets in. Jubby wants to run away but I’m trying to hold her still and AdoringHusband is trying to get the car seat onto the GoGo Kidz carrier. He tries and tries. The plane empties completely, the flight crew passes us in the terminal and AdoringHusband is still trying to get the car seat to sit on the GoGo Kidz stably. By now, he sounds like a person with Tourette’s Syndrome. All the shits and fucks that are coming from his mouth… and I am 2 seconds away from freaking the hell out. I want to start moving even if it means carrying Jubby and the car seat. AdoringHusband does not agree. “Just give me another minute!” he snaps.

Have you ever been so upset, so totally tweaked that you can feel hysteria welling up inside you? I could feel myself start to lose it. I shifted from one foot to the other, tears welled up in my eyes, and at the same time uncontrolled crazy-lady laughter started to come up in my throat. I was about to lose my shit. Calmdowncalmdowncalmdown… And then Jubby went into her boneless baby routine.

At long last Tourette’s Man finally managed to get the car seat on the GoGo Kidz carrier. We put Jubby in and we ran. We ran down hallways, up escalators down other hallways, scooting around people like we were playing some demented video game. When we finally arrived down by passport control and baggage claim, I was so thankful that AH had gotten the GoGo Kidz to work. There was no way we could have made it that far that fast carrying Z.

We ran through baggage claim and went up to departures to get to the outside (before security) check-in gate. When we arrived panting and bedraggled, the woman we encountered tried to tell us that the flight was closed. Our heads exploded. But then she asked, “were you on a connecting flight?” “Yes, from Faro,” we gasped, “They didn’t give us boarding passes and we were told we had to come out here.” She looked at Jubby and took pity on us.

We passed through this front level screening and then moved to the screening at the counter. There the woman had to account for all of our baggage. Unfortunately the dimwitted man at the ticket counter in Faro gave us more stubs than we had bags. This was a major problem since if the bags couldn’t be accounted for, we would have big problems! the bags She threatened to make us check everything, including our carry ons. I tried to explain that this was not tenable since we were traveling with an infant. We just couldn’t check everything. And she got all “Well then you have to figure out what happened with these tags!” That’s the point at which AdoringHusband lost his shit. “What the hell are you talking about?! Just because this idiot gave us too many tags, we’re penalized!”

“AdoringHusband,” I said sharply. “Breathe.”

“Look,” I began to the woman,” we’re a bit stressed and I apologize. But the agent in Faro was not quite sure what he was doing. He put a checked bag tag on Zara’s car seat when we told him that it was going into the cabin. He also initially tried to check us just to Dublin and not to Philly.”

Sufficiently mollified, she pulled the tag from Jubby’s car seat and went through each other tag a bit closer. Two minutes later we found that the checked bag number was seven, as we said, and we inched closer to the plane.

She printed our boarding passes and handed them to us with customs forms. Her last words to us were, “go right to the plane.” I was like yeah right we’re gonna stop and have a couple of cappuccinos! Of course we’re going right to the plane. She also mentioned something about filling out the customs forms but that didn’t sound right. You do that on the plane before you land, right? Anyway, I was too busy running toward security.

Amazingly, we found our way into the line that had nobody in it. Once again, I set off the alarm, but after my patdown I grabbed Jubby and put her back into carrier and we ran. And this is where we had our next near international incident.

We are flying through the airport with me in the lead pulling Jubby in the GoGo Kidz/car seat while I am weaving in and out between people again. At this point I am completely and totally frantic. I am afraid that I am not going to make the plane, that we will have to find someplace stay in Dublin, and everything will be ruined if we don’t make this plane. So focused am I on getting to the gate that I cut across a gentleman a little too sharply and his leg caught on the car seat carrier. I didn’t have as good grip on the handle as I thought and when I felt this resistance, the handle pulled right out of my hands! I turned around and saw my precious daughter in her car seat tumble sideways to the floor and start to cry. OMG! Zara!

I run back and am on the floor checking her out to make sure she’s not hurt. She’s crying wildly but doesn’t seem to be injured especially since she was in her car seat. At this point I’m crying and berating myself for worrying more about the plane than Zara, but I did not see AH during all this drama. Again he was trying to kill someone with the stare of death. Somehow he had gotten the idea that it was the man’s fault for this whole incident when the fault was mine. Finally I heard the man say to his friend “the girl came running around and she tripped over my leg and now the guy is looking at me like he wants to start a fight! I’ll give him a fight, but nonna this was my fault!” I looked over at AdoringHusband and see him glowering at the man with a look that spoke of a horrific and painful death. He had his fists clenched and looked ready to spring.

I could tell that I had to do something very quickly or the situation was going to escalate. “AdoringHusband!” I began, “it was me! It was my fault. The man didn’t do anything.”

At first he looked unconvinced. Then his glaring softened a little bit though he still appeared to want to hold the guy responsible for something: like being alive. Eventually we scraped ourselves off the floor, got our things and continued wheeling a still crying Jubby to the gate. Or at least to where we thought the gate would be. There was a sign for gate 33 but instead of seats, waiting passengers and an airplane, all we saw in front of us was a woman sitting at a podium in front of a down escalator. What now? I wondered.

We ran up to her somewhat frantically blurting that we were trying to get to the flight to Philly at gate 33. “Well you have to go through customs first,” she explained, “did you fill out your form?”

Oh good lord! Is this what that agent was talking about? Of course, I had not even thought about filling it out during our trecherous run to this point. So now I’m digging in my purse trying to find a pen, filling out the stupid form and trying to figure out how are we going to get Jubby down the escalator in the contraption without any more mishaps. I guess I seemed like I was at the end of my rope.

“Take a breath,” the customs lady said, “the plane isn’t going anywhere without you.” And to prove that she was actually a good fairy, she called someone who put us on the special elevator down to…well, one of the weirdest situations I’ve seen in an airport. It looked like the area you normally go through in passport control as you’re leaving the airport but instead you went through one of the lines, had your passport stamped and then stood in another line waiting to get to your plane. And the additional problem was that there were multiple plane lines, so we almost ended up in the line for Washington, DC. Eventually we were directed to the jetway for our flight to Philly. We had made it.

We banged our way down to our assigned seats apologizing, sweating and feeling like idiots. People looked at us like we were Martians. Zara sneezed in one man’s direction and he acted as if he had been shot. “Just allergies,” I tried to assure him, but he gave me the fisheye anyway.

Unsurprisingly, after all that running around with her in her car seat, the last thing Zara wanted to do when we finally got to the plane was to actually sit in her car seat. She got coaxed with a lollipop to stay in her seat until takeoff and after that we just did the best we could (and contemplated Benadryl). We rotated the toys, played Baby Einstein videos, ate bland pasta and continued to apologize to the guy in front whose seat she continued to kick.

After the first four hours of the flight I decided it was time to give dear Daddy a shift with Jubby. AdoringHusband happily agreed to this and we switched seats. Yet for some reason he did not seem to understand that when it was your turn to take care of a child, that meant the child got your full attention. You didn’t try to feed her while continuing to watch to Demi Moore in Flawless, missing her mouth in the process. And his repertoire of activities was sorely limited.

“Well she doesn’t want to sit and she doesn’t want to be held, so what am I supposed to do with her?” he asks me.

“Is that all you can come up with to entertain her?”

“Yes.”

I rolled my eyes. So even though I was on break, so to speak, I ended up having to intervene many, many times because my dear husband was doing a pretty half assed job of parenting on an airplane, especially when there was a movie he wanted to watch.

Amazingly we landed in Philly. We were home and our adventure with the toddler was over. It was just a matter of getting our bags, the car and driving back to the old homestead to make sure the cats were still alive.

We deplaned and Jubby and I stood near the gate as Tourette’s Man worked to reassemble the damn GoGo Kidz carrier. The plane emptied. A flight attendant asked us if we needed help. “We’re OK,” I reassured her. Tourette’s Man continued to struggle and curse. I attempted to keep Jubby from picking up the trash on the floor around her. Ugh. But I was done with the anxiety, done with the freaking out ’cause we were home.

It took AH so long to get that damn seat together that by the time we got moving, everyone from our plane had gone from the hallway and through customs. The good thing was that we were right on time for our bags to come out on the belt.

We wisely got a skycap to help us with our 5 thousand bags. And then we saw it. AdoringHusband’s brand new Tumi suitcase came off the belt with a huge freaking tear in it. Huge! The skycap said that we needed to go to the airlines baggage office to file a claim. The problem was (and there is always a problem) that we were in Terminal A West and the baggage claim office is in Terminal B/C.

Now here’s where things get really stupid. And for this portion of the disaster, we need a map. Here is a map of the Philadelphia International Airport:
Map of Philadelphia Airport
Get your own at Scribd or explore others: Government Science map airport
Let’s continue. We are so tired, so totally spent that we decide to follow the skycap without question. Big mistake. First he says, “let’s go up to the airline people at the counter in Terminal A to see if they will take the report.” He assures us that they have done this before for others to save them the trip to Terminal B and C baggage claim. This means that we have to go upstairs, walk back over the bridge to the departures section of Terminal A East. (Follow your map, folks) Guess what? The sista-girls at the counter tell us, “uh-uh, you’ve got to go to Terminal B.”

But the skycap decides that no, he’s going to go down to Terminal A East baggage claim and see if there is someone there who can take the claim. So we walk back over the bridge, take the elevator back down and go out Terminal A West baggage claim to Terminal A East baggage claim (this is all while toting Jubby in the GoGo Kidz/car seat thing). The guy at information in Terminal A East says, “oh no, you have to go down to Terminal B & C.”

OK, I’m thinking to myself, let’s just walk down the street to Terminal B and get this done. But no, the skycap stops me. “We have to go to Terminal B on the other side,” he says.

I’m like, “Huh? Terminal B baggage claim is down the street here.”

“No ma’am,” he assures me, “Terminal B is back across the bridge on the other side back where we came from.”

Now I’ve got to segue here. As you know, I travel so much that PHL is my second office. I know that Terminal B baggage claim is down the street a little way down from where we stood in Terminal A East’s baggage claim. But I’m so damn tired and confused and wishing I was home that I didn’t even put up a fight. I just grabbed Jubby’s carrier and followed behind the guy pushing all our luggage on that giant cart.

We went back up and over and then down to Terminal B departures where the skycap encountered other skycaps. And what did they tell him? “Oh buddy, you’ve got to go back over to Terminal B baggage claim over on the other side!”

You know I must have been exhausted because all I could muster was a quiet, “See, I did say that.”

We then went back upstairs to Terminal A East (instead of Terminal B for some insane reason), crossed over the bridge, went down the elevator and then out the door of Terminal A East baggage claim. From there we walked about 7 miles…OK, 3 long blocks to Terminal B baggage claim. Finally we arrived at the airline baggage office.

Thirty minutes later we were loading the car with AdoringHusband’s cardboard suitcases (since the baggage office took his damaged one), getting Jubby settled into her car seat (quite easily since she was way tired by now), and setting off for home.

And there you have it everyone, one easy-peasy vacation with a toddler. Can’t wait for the next trip!