It’s true.  I haven’t been contributing to this blog, and one of the biggest reasons for that is that I’ve simply been too damned busy with organizing the trip and preparing customer deliverables in order to clear 10 or so days to cover travel and acclimatization.  The other, and probably larger reason, is that I’ve had a lot of trouble pulling a concise narrative from the maelstrom of crazy thoughts which have been inhabiting my head since, oh I don’t know, January or so.

So here goes.  We’re in a little café in Amsterdam, still at the airport.  Our travel plans were as follows: LAX to Amsterdam to Barcelona.  From there, we’d reserved a rental car, and were to drive the 2 hours from Barcelona to our new home in Céret, France.  Our landlady is waiting for us at our new place, and we’re looking very forward to meeting her.

Matters became mildly complicated when Young Max opted to come with us, and spend a few weeks with us, helping us set up shop, purchase and build office furniture, etc.  
All is good, but the wheels completely fell off of our travel plans today when our flight our of LAX (on a BIG ‘OL Boeing 747) was delayed for an hour because they packed the commercial cargo units wrong, and had to empty out the entire cargo bay and repack it. 

So, needless to say, we didn’t make it to Amsterdam in time to make our connector to Barcelona.  This was only made worse by the fact that I chose to bring carry-on my Canon and gear, and all of my microphones, which I didn’t trust to check. It was a HUGE relief to be informed by the information staff here at the airport that our dog Ghani is not sitting in some closet somewhere scared to death and stewing in her own urine.  She’s currently checked into the Airport “Pet Hotel” where she’s being walked, petted, fed, watered, and played with.  Well how’s about that?  Pretty cool.

Now, it seems that they’ve never seen a suitcase full of video gear here in Amsterdam, as evidenced by the madness that the contents of my carry-on has incited.  Sigh… Anyway, here we are, breaking fast, sipping tea.  Flying out of Amsterdam at 2pm instead of 10am.  No big deal, but we’re now afraid that we’ll lose our auto rental reservation, and truly find ourselves stuck in Barcelona.

This wouldn’t be such a huge issue either, were in not for the fact that we have 8 suitcases and Ghani-the-dog in a crate to transport.  In fact, it might be good to note, that I spent $700 this morning to check the dog and the extra suitcases today.  Despite this expense, it was still a lot more affordable to ship this stuff through the airline, and not to send UPS, FedEx, or even USPS.  I have my juicer in one of our suitcases, and that item was going to cost me $620 to ship via UPS, so that’s actually a huge win.

Never a dull moment.  Always an adventure.  Excelsior.  Whatever.  We’re on the continent, and that’s almost as good as there in my book.

This post was originally published on our FoleysInFrance.com travelblog.  Check us out there.