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’d get to set foot in Porto.
Perhaps 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 bit of a rocky start. And as per normal, 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 Saturday morning. About 24 hours before my departure, I logged onto the airline app on my phone to get checked in. But it wouldn’t let me do so. I kept getting an error message informing me I needed 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 click an extra box when I booked my ticket. So where in the world did the airline get this idea 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 probably 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 this “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 out. 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 hiccups popped up around 9 pm last night, when I got an alert from the airline on my phone. The message said they were offering to change my flight to a later day.
Huh?!? What was that about?
At first I assumed the offer was because they oversold my flight. The DFW airport is a major North American 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 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 on the front end 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 plan. 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 just to burn time. About 90 minutes before my flight though, I decided to sit down and log into the airport WiFi so I could load an eSIM to my phone.
I am not tech savvy. I freely admit that. And this was the first time I tried to load an eSIM on my phone. But I purchased an unlocked iPhone last year so I could use it during my interntional 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 though, I still think I managed messed it up. Suddenly my phone showed no bars. Then the SOS/satellite symbol popped up as if I was out of cell range. So now I worry I may have even accidentally erased my primary (Verizon) eSIM in the process of trying to load my overseas eSIM.
I double checked three time that I was still supposedly using my US SIM card and not the overseas (data only) one. Yes, I was. But my phone wasn’t showing any bars still. Had I really just erased my SIM card?? I turned my phone on and off, thinking maybe it needed to reset. But still no dice.
I can’t be 100% certain what the problem might be though because while I was trying to troubleshoot the issue on the airport Wifi, my flight started boarding.
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.
