Sunday April 29, 2024
Before I could even begin the Camino Portugúes, I had to get there. Living on the West Coast of the US doesn’t make this easy. It’s more than a 5,000-mile, multi-flight journey across North America, over the Atlantic Ocean, and to my starting point on the Iberian Peninsula. And so, I had 20 hours of plane travel (including my layovers at DFW and in Madrid) before I could to set foot in Porto.
You can already guess by the title of this post, but I wasn’t in for a stress-free ride. There were no major catastrophes, but the trip got off to a somewhat rocky start. And, as usual, my bad luck seemed to come in threes…
HICCUP #1
The first of these three mishaps occurred when I attempted to check in for my flight on Saturday morning. About 24 hours before my departure, I logged onto the airline app on my phone to check in. But it wouldn’t let me do so. I kept getting an error message informing me I needed to check in at the airport because I was flying internationally with a lap child.
WTF?!?!
I immediately double-checked my booking, confirming that it said nothing about a lap child. There was nothing there. I hadn’t accidentally clicked an extra box when I booked my ticket. So, where did the airline get the idea that I was flying with a lap child? My kid is 17 years old. He isn’t flying to Portugal. And he definitely was going there on my lap (or anyone else’s)!!
A more relaxed personality would have just shrugged it off and waited until they arrived at the airport this morning to sort out the mistake. But that wasn’t going to work for me. I had a 5:30 a.m. flight. If I waited to address the “lap child” check-in issue immediately before my flight, I’d have to show up at the airport at 3:30 am. Or maybe even earlier. That idea was a serious non-starter in my book. So I took an unplanned trip out to my local airport at lunchtime yesterday to resolve the issue at the ticket counter.
Interestingly, the American Airlines agent had no clue what I was talking about. Even after I showed him my phone and the message on the app, he didn’t know what to make of it. Their system didn’t show me traveling with a lap infant. He said he just needed to scan my passport, and then he sent me on my way with my boarding passes. It must have just been a glitch with the app. No biggie.
HICCUP #2
Of course, that wasn’t the end of the travel issues. The second hiccup occurred around 9 pm last night, when I received an alert from the airline on my phone. The message stated that they were offering to change my flight to a later date.
Huh?!? What was that about?
Initially, I assumed the offer was because they had oversold my flight. The DFW airport is a hub for American Airlines. It stood to reason they had more people traveling there than seats. But this wasn’t the issue at all. Not even close.
The real reason for the alert was because the National Weather Service just issued a warning of severe weather at DFW with “very large hail, damaging winds, and tornadoes” over the next 12 hours.
So now I had a new worry, which kept me up half the night, fretting that a new text would come in canceling my flight to DFW entirely – just as it had at the beginning of my trip to Ireland and Scotland last September.
But just as with the “lap child” hiccup earlier in the day, the bad weather didn’t ultimately derail my trip. Lady Luck and good fortune were still on my side. The storm pushed east of the Dallas-Fort Worth area about 90 minutes before we landed at the airport. I wouldn’t need to endure the rough air until we flew over the strong storm that evening while en route to Europe.
HICCUP #3
The final mishap didn’t occur until moments before I was ready to board the plane. I’d book a longer connection in DFW to avoid missing my flight to Europe. This meant I had a 5-hour layover in Dallas, which I spent walking the entire length of the A, B, C, D terminals to burn time. About 90 minutes before my flight, I decided to sit down and log in to the airport WiFi so I could load an eSIM onto my phone.
I am not tech-savvy. I freely admit that. This was the first time I had tried to load an eSIM onto my phone. But I purchased an unlocked iPhone last year so I could use it during my international travels, keeping my US-based Verizon SIM card as my primary eSIM, and adding an Airalo eSIM for my European data needs.
Despite watching a step-by-step “how-to” video on the airport Wifi, I think I managed to mess it up. Suddenly, my phone showed no cell service bars. I was still sitting in the DFW airport. I hadn’t activated the new eSIM yet. However, the SOS/satellite symbol appeared as if I were out of cell range. Did I accidentally erase my primary eSIM while trying to load my overseas eSIM. Why did I have no service?
I double-checked three times that I was still using my US SIM card and not the overseas (data-only) one. Yes, I was. However, my phone still wasn’t showing any bars. I turned my phone on and off, thinking it needed to reset. But still no dice.
I can’t be 100% certain what the problem might be, though, because my flight started boarding while I was trying to troubleshoot the issue on the airport Wifi.
I guess I wouldn’t know for sure if either eSIM was working properly until my plane landed in Madrid in 9.5+ hours. Fingers crossed that I didn’t just shoot myself in the foot while trying to make my life easier.
