Travel day has finally arrived, and we’re ready to go (actually we’ve been ready to go for a while now!). Flying out of Greenville, we give ourselves plenty of time to make the drive, including possible traffic back-ups (which Google is showing, but which fortunately don’t materialize). We have plenty of time to spare when we arrive at the airport, which is a good thing since the reserved parking we’ve paid for in advance (only a $5 fee) is totally full. We are lucky that we find a space a few rows away from the reserve area because the lot is pretty full and we’d have been totally ticked off if we had to go to another lot.
Check in is simple, and once handled we ask the Info Ladies about the parking situation. They give us the manager’s phone number, which we call and leave a message. We head to the bar, forgetting we can go to the restaurant in Greenville and use our Priority Pass. Before we leave the bar for the gate, the parking folks have emailed us, expressing their apologies and refunded our $5. So, while irritating, great back end customer service!
Schedules work perfectly. Planes are all on time. We have plenty of time in Dulles to get to our flight to Zurich, and while we didn’t get lucky with an empty middle seat as we had hoped on the international flight, our seat mate is a nice guy who is happy to switch out seats for an aisle. The flight is uneventful, except for the fact that we’ve been tracking our bags and suddenly we have 3 bag tags listed on our account. Hmmmm….we only checked in 2…..bonus bag? Shopping in someone else’s luggage, perhaps? Maybe it’s just a glitch.
In Zurich, we have a 4 hour layover, which we spend in the lounge trying to figure out the luggage thing. We call United and they tell us that both our bags are still in Dulles, on the United app it shows one bag in Greenville, one bag in Dulles and one bag in Zurich with us. Sigh. The lounge attendant gets into the act after I ask about making copies of our itinerary for the lost baggage folks in Bucharest. She is like a dog with a bone, she checks the luggage on her system, calls her supervisor, calls 2 or 3 luggage people “down stairs” to see if they can find the bags. Essentially, no one knows what happened, but we have everybody on the look out now – that’s for certain.
The flight to Bucharest is quick and easy, and, as expected, we only have 1 bag waiting for us. Bummer. (Thank God we cross pack! While we wouldn’t want to do the whole trip with only one bag, we could if we are forced.) We make our claim with the lost baggage team (who are so nice and efficient), then wander around a bit trying to find our driver – who we eventually meet up with – and head into Bucharest. Oh my, the traffic! It’s late in the day, so people are starting to leave work, and it is a Friday, but still. Our driver tells us this is nothing, it will get worse the later it gets. Geez, the Beltway ain’t got nothing on this! (Later on subsequent tours we find out that Bucharest has the third worst traffic following Moscow and Kiev – we believe it!)
We arrive at the Hilton Garden Inn and settle into our room, which is very nice and modern. We have time enough to go in search of the grocery store to stock the room, and even though it shows on the map, we end up missing it and hitting the rip-off (relatively speaking) mini-mart on the corner. As we are walking back to the hotel, we stumble upon the grocery store only because a woman is leaving and we glimpse the store before the door shuts. There is absolutely no signage, the door itself is completely covered in a full size opaque poster of fruit, and there are no picture windows, just small opaque almost transom windows high up in the wall. Weird! But, now we’ve found it, and we can return to buy the cheap beer and wine, along with snacks. Storing our purchases in the fridge, we freshen up in time to head to our orientation with the Tour director and the rest of our tour group. Cristina is our director, and she seems very nice, organized and pleasant, the rest of the group seem nice – from all over the U.S. and Canada. There is a couple from Blowing Rock (small world) and another couple, Lori and Raul, from outside Atlanta (who are going to be on the river cruise as well), plus many others we will meet and hang out with over the course of the trip. But for now, it’s the introduction and then onto the welcome dinner in the restaurant of the hotel. It’s a nice evening, culminating in a very comfortable air conditioned room with a comfy bed where we can sleep off our jet lag.
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