K went on his own to Europe, well not exactly on his own, but without us anyways. It was for a school history trip. He came to us about this trip a few years ago. And it was the day after the last day to put your name on the list. I guess he didn't know about it until one of his buddies had mentioned it and he brought it to us to see if it was okay.
We both said, sure. Travel is a great education. It's about learning how other places, cultures have solved similar problems and what we can take from it and apply it here in our own backyard. It's not just about transportation, and construction, but also internal issues and social issues. How have they handled it and what lessons can we learn from it?
But since he was late to the game, he was on the waiting list for the 2022 trip. Well that trip didn't happen anyways so fast forward to 2023 and he was immediately put on the list for that. Great! Now we had to pay that bill off, and I had just finished paying for his braces. My bank account was like a conveyor belt of charges, mostly withdrawals.
We checked his passport and it was expired. We started this back in June of 2022, and if you had submitted a new passport application back in Jan 2022, it would have been turned around in a month. But come June everyone was sick of travel bans and were booking travel, and airlines were overbooking as they were in the RED for 2 years! Lets get all the lost revenue back ASAP was their back to BLACK campaign. The only ones unprepared were the airports. Understaffed and overwhelmed. It was probably good to have a wait and see attitude here. But people with the means, will do, and then complain on social media and point the finger at everyone but themselves.
So submitted passport application in June. Luckily I got an appointment at a Service Canada office to have the passport application reviewed and submitted in June. At the top there were 2 options, come in 3 hrs before the office opens to be 5th in line to see a Service Canada rep, or find a timeslot. When i first booked it was in mid August. But i went back in and noticed an opening the very next morning at 8am. So i took it!
I brought K with me just in case he was required and good thing too, there was something not right and he was there to correct it and we could submit. They told me due to the immense backlog, we'd realistically get it back by end of Aug. I'd been advised by those that seem to know how to work the system to provide a date of departure to get it back sooner rather than later. I did initially but wasn't prepared for exact dates and flights etc, cuz i'm not so savvy. Since we were not in a hurry as we had 9 months before his trip. I didn't concern myself too much on turnaround. I had lots of time. I'm not a a dilly dallier when it comes to this stuff.
There were all these people that mailed it in, and had not received their passports after 4 months and others that submitted 2 at same time and only 1 returned in time for their trip. Well that end of August date came and went. I couldn't even get a status on it, because it wasn't MY passport. In any case. In Sept they told me all they could say was it was in the processing queue. Meaning it finally was taken up and would be about a month. Standard processing time when there's no backlog. We got it back in Oct.
Then came the Christmas rush and broken conveyor belts, missing luggage, and people using AirTags and other tracker devices on their luggage to find out where their stuff was. So a few months before his trip I bought a pair of Samsung SmartTag+, which are only compatible with Samsung phones. Good thing I tested it on K's ski trip. The tag could not be located! How can that be? his phone is in the bus directly over the ski bag? So the way these tracker devices is work is by communicating with other trackers of the same make they help each other provide location of a tracker tag. Apple AirTags have the most users so they will track the best. The 2nd most common tracker is Tile. I got those and they worked well on this trip. It all depends if a Tile was able to pass it's location to another tile which would send it to another tile that could upload it up to Tile and i could get K's luggage tile last known location. It actually worked pretty well. But his luggage was never checked in. We told him to put it in the overhead, so it wouldn't get lost along the way.
His trip didn't get off on the right foot, as the BritAir plane was late coming in to YYZ and so they immediately missed their connector in Heathrow to Berlin and ended up in Munich. The other group on Lufthansa arrived on schedule in Berlin and ended up picking up the others in Munich and they continued on from there. The only fortunate thing was he brought his HH boots instead of the running shoes, weather showed rain for the first half of the trip. And in the mountains it really came in handy. This is what happens when you don't pack your own crap. Luckily for him it worked out. So lesson NOT LEARNED!
When I looked at the itinerary - five (5) countries, 5+ cities in less than 12 days. I thinking. Glad I'm not on this trip. This is exhausting.
(Home) Toronto >> via Heathrow >>
Munich (was Berlin) > quick stop in Salzburg Austria >> Prague, Czech >> Krakow, Poland > Tatra Mountains, Slovakia >> Budapest, Hungary > pitstop in Bratislava, Slovakia >> Vienna, Austria
>> via Heathrow >> Toronto (Home)
Update on the Tile trackers. K has one for his wallet, and another in the luggage. They worked pretty well. I could see the tiles in Heathrow and I could see the luggage tile showing they were on the runway. But sometimes one tile would be in 1 city and the other had not updated for hours. Not sure why that is, but when i asked K if he had his luggage with him he said yes. I said for some reason the luggage was showing in Salzburg but the wallet in Prague. Then it would update and they were in the same location again. Each Tile would update it's location as it connected with other Tiles. For the most part I was very pleased with how it performed. As for the SmartTag+ i use them to locate my keys or phone at home. I wouldn't recommend them for tracking your luggage on a trip. Now back to the History Trip 2023!
It was nice to follow the trip on the History group on the school portal. There was a blog post from the boys reflecting on that day's visit. It was something to look forward to after each day. Auschwitz was a significant one. And K's post was their vist to the Tatra mountains. His SLO skills came in handy there, it was nice to read that. He said he had a lot of fun in Budapest, all the Euro training at the cottage came in handy there, and it was there they ran into the Business trip group. That's why the group photo is so large.
So there was also Business trip in parallel to this History trip that he could have gone on, but you can only choose one. They were in London for 5 days and then in Budapest for 5 days. In hindsight K said he would have liked to have stayed in 1 place longer than 1.5 days. How the business trip was planned would have been better he said, you get to experience more. The best hotel location was in Budapest as it was in the city center. And the prettiest city was Prague, but the hotel was the least nice. And the nicest hotel was in Krakow. Overall it was a trip he would never experience again as a teen. Time is flying, soon he'll become an adult, and your whole perspective changes. Priorities change responsibilities become prevalent. Life changes. He'll realize later how fortunate this experience was.
Not sure what is up with BAW, but there was an issue that almost caused a delay getting home. A student had a ticket booked for a different flight! The flight with the other students arrived without a glitch. As K's plane got to the gate at Pearson, I get a text from him saying "Stuck on plane ramp broke!" - the ramp malfunctioned and passengers could not disembark. They were stuck on the plane for 45mins. They ended up backing up the plane from the gate and going to another gate. I think it's a BREXIT thing.
Finally off the plane, there's a big queue at Customs. T was waiting at the terminal as I sat in the car at the cell phone
parking lot waiting for the call that they were ready for pickup.
Two hours after landing, K was finally in the car and on the way home. And he was pooped and glad to be home. The next few days was jet lag recovery mode.
It was nice for him to experience something other than cottage winter during March break. The 12 days flew. He was gone and back in the blink of an eye.
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