Tue - Arrival
The passport actually arrived, after much
consternation and risk-mitigation (yeah yeah, I'm a
geek.)
The trip was uneventful - and
Lufthansa serves up the booze.
Well, we made it to Oslo -
with
Kayleigh! Yes, that was a
surprise.
You may not know the passport
story... basically, this being a last minute trip and Kayleigh's recently
expired passport led to a lot of stress. Of course she should come along; we
might move there. Well, we had better get that passport renewed NOW. After a
trip to the passport application joint in downtown Portland, we realized that we
needed to either travel, all of us together, to Seattle and appear in person -
or hire an expediter service to get the passport in time. So the expediter
said, no, they
guaranteed,
that it would arrive on Friday or Saturday. I naturally took this to mean
Saturday, but called on Thursday, and then Friday - just to be sure. "It'll be
there tomorrow" was the answer on Friday. Well, they say that tomorrow never
comes, but it did and the passport did not.
No passport on Saturday meant that we
had to go to plan G, aka Granmere Jennifer. We called Mom and arranged for her
to arrive Sunday night. She'll stay at the house and we would go to Oslo sans
Kayleigh. Thank you Frontier for letting me use miles for this ticket... how
cool is that?
Mom arrived Sunday
night, and low and behold, the passport arrived Monday morning, a full 45
minutes before we had to leave for the airport! I don't mean to tell people how
to do their jobs, but the expediter hadn't checked the Saturday-delivery box on
the Fedex package.
Oops.
(pardon my lack of French.)
"Kayleigh,
do you want to come to Oslo or stay
here?"
"It'd be fine to stay with
Grandma, but I want to go to Norway." (Mom tells a less 'diplomatic' version of
Kayleigh's reply.)
"Go pack. I'll call
Frontier and get Grandma a flight home. Tracy, please call Nancy to re-enlist
as dogsitter... wait, call Nancy first - no dogsitter, no trip for
Kayleigh."
Nancy rocks - she even came
and drove us all to the airport... and Mom's flight left about 1.5 hours after
ours. Wow.
Thank you, thank you, thank
you, Frontier and Nancy. My
goodness.
Thank you, thank you, thank
you, thank you, Mom - being on call, flying to Portland, flying to Denver, all
in 24 hours - so amazing.
And so we ALL
made the flight to Oslo.
I'll spare you
the details of the travel - same old story about too-short layovers, delays,
security, etc. Oh, Lufthansa does serve a mean bloody
Mary.
When we arrived, we waited for
the rest of our friends to arrive at the airport; then we headed off to our
friends of friend's house (where
does
that apostrophe go?) - and the grocer, and the beds... so nice to be
here.
Did I mention the frozen pizza
for dinner? The Lonely planet recommended it... go figure. I'm certain we got
the wrong brand.
Posted: Tue - February 20, 2007 at 11:37 PM