The Preparations
...or
A Good Argument for Drug Testing
(only 1 question: Who needs testing?)
The preparations for our trip were to be almost as disastrous as
the first day of the vacation itself.
Part of our problem with setting up the vacation was our trying to decide where we were actually going to go on our vacation. I hate air travel, and Robert couldn't tolerate it anymore with his bad back. Same for Robert on busses, so we were limited to modes of transportation that either had reasonable seats, or would let us get up and move around a lot. This meant either trains or ships.
We sat in our travel agent's office for seemingly hours, making all sorts of indecisive noises, trying to decide where to go, while the travel agent tried to look like she really didn't just wish we'd get the hell out of her office. Superficially, it'd be easy enough as far as I was concerned: Just take a two- week cruise up the St. Lawrence and the coast of Newfoundland. Or, maybe just a cruise out to Greenland and back. Only troubles were that no such cruises exist, and Robert wasn't so sure he wanted to get on a boat, anyway.
Actually, Robert wasn't too sure he even wanted to waste his time and money on a vacation in the first place, but he was still trying to keep his chin up and face it stoically, sort of like how he’d face proctologist appointment. This represented a large contribution to our hemming and hawing. Of course, I'd promised to pay for it, taking away Robert's largest source of foot- dragging.
Large amounts of credit are due to our travel agent who has had to suffer through several days of this process for the second time in as many years. If I had to guess, she's gone on to another career by now, just so we won't be able to find her to do this to again.
She finally came up with a train vacation across Canada on VIA (the Canadian passenger rail system), and even made it sound like it was our idea. As a matter of fact, upon seeing my hesitation, she did us one better than that, making it sound like Robert's idea. Even if Robert didn't want to do this, I still wanted him to decide on where we were going and how we were getting there. Maybe it was just my being indecisive, but it was probably also a matter of covering my butt, in case Robert had a lousy time. This way, he would have only himself to blame, or at least that's the theory.
You'd think that with the mode of transportation and general destination (trains to the other side of Canada) decided on, making these arrangements would be simple enough, and they certainly started out that way. The agent asked us when we wanted to go, and we just told her that we could go whenever she could get us reservations, even if that meant leaving the next day.
She came pretty close to that. She called up the VIA representative and booked us on a train leaving about two weeks into the future. Well, that was the easy part, because what followed was an hour long discussion as to how we were supposed to pay them, and how much it was going to cost us.
Again, this doesn't say anything bad about the travel agent, because she wasn't the one who was confused. Evidently, the person on the other end of the phone, for whom English was not a first language (or even in the top ten), and for whom life is still a new proposition, didn't really know how to make these reservations, and maybe hadn't even tried before. This was obviously a government run rail system.
There were loads of action packed minutes of our agent being on hold while the VIA rep went back and checked and double checked everything with her supervisor, who seemed just as confused as she was. Finally, after a lot of haggling and "are you sure"s, they came up with a procedure whereby we federal expressed a couple of blank credit card slips (blank in dollar amount, but still imprinted with my card) to the train station in Toronto, and they'd send us some CanRail passes, so we could Federal Express the CanRail passes back with another blank credit card slip, so they could return the passes and our tickets.
This made me understandably uncomfortable about what I was going to end up paying, or for that matter, if we were even going to get real train tickets. I was even more uncomfortable when they called the agent back the next day and told her that the dollar amount and the procedure were both completely wrong, and that they'd have to do the whole thing all over again. This time they did have a definite dollar amount, but they wouldn't give those blank credit card slips back to us.
Therefore, on the day before the vacation was to start, I really had no idea what was going to end up on my credit card bill, nor did I have any confidence that we'd actually have real tickets and real reservations when we showed up in Union Station in Toronto. The agent could probably see this on my face when I walked into her office for a little reassurance, because she just got onto the phone to reconfirm the whole mess. She wrote down the name of the VIA guy who'd told her that everything was cool, and sent us packing on our way.
Aside from that, the plane ticketing and hotel reservations were a piece of cake. Oh yeah, plane reservations: Despite my best efforts, the only way they wanted to get us to Toronto was by air, and after all the hassles we had with VIA, I couldn't see trying to push our luck any farther.
Since there weren't any direct flights from Manchester to Toronto, this also meant that we'd have to take the shuttle van from Merrimack down to Logan, which meant one more degree of uncertainty in the whole thing, and maybe one more ride we were going to have to bum off someone if we didn't want to leave the car parked in the Hilton's parking lot all weekend.
The hotel reservations were easy in that none of us (the travel agent, Robert or I) knew anything about hotels in Canada, or even the names of the better chains. The way we decided was by throwing darts at a travel agent's version of an "All Canada" yellow pages. Naturally, we'd reject out of hand anyplace that advertised rooms by the hour, but aside from that, we weren't that discriminating.
We did pick one place in Toronto that we thought sounded like the place we'd stayed on our vacation through there four years before, but beyond that one, we didn't have any idea of what we were going to be in for. All I knew was that we picked some names, and she called them up and gave them my credit card number.
All of this handing out of my credit card to everyone in the phone book was getting me just a bit stressed out, too. I finally broke down on the day before the vacation, and called American Express to check my balance, just to see who'd charged me how much for what. Real smart companies, these, because none of them posted anything to my account until we left town, and wouldn't be able to check so easily. Before then, my balance was $0.00, and my blood pressure was up.
Follow Robert and me on to our first day of vacation!
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