Sheer Panic!

Greetings from Edinburgh! Wow! What a lovely place this is!

The mobile rang this morning and it turned out to be my travel agent. “Good morning Iris, we have your tickets here for you to pick up and we were wondering when you would be picking them up?”

What the BLEEP!?!?!?

You can imagine the horror! Just over 48hours before I leave for SA and here my travel agent tells me I have printed tickets waiting for me in Bath! And that’s for ALL my flights! And here I thought they were all e-tickets! At least that's what I was told. Twice!

Turns out that they were checking through their files yesterday and found that I still hadn’t picked up my tickets so today called me to tell me to pick them up. The problem is that I’m in Edinburgh…that’s just, uhm let’s see now, almost 400 miles away?!?!

Luckily I can say that it’s all been sorted now. Solution: They send one of their employees to London today and drop it off at one of their branches in London (one that is open on Sundays), and I go pick it up there on the way to Heathrow (airport). Turns out I have to go to Victoria underground station which is a bit of a detour but hey, at least that means my trip is still on!

Reason why it went I bit wrong? Apparently the booking system they use at STA Travel shows that the flights they were putting me on were issued with e-tickets but it turns out that because I bought all these tickets as a combined “around-the world-trip-ticket”, they all had to be printed. So much for the “paper-less” world we want to live in!

Besides the scare this morning, Edinburgh is treating me well. Apparently it was going to start raining in Holland yesterday but I’ve arrived in Edinburgh and it’s just finally clearing up! It’s been raining here non-stop and flooding! I seem to be following the lovely weather! The sun is shining, though it’s only about 10 degrees outside….brrr….