I have a list. Actually I have a lot of lists. I have a list of books to read and book suggestions and movies to watch and a grocery list and a to-do list and a Christmas shopping list. To name a few, that is. The list I'm talking about today is my travel list, the list of places I want to go and things I want to see. This is the oldest list I have, I've been adding to it since childhood.
Scotland has been at the top of that list since I was probably 12 or 13. Maybe longer. So when the completion of my B.A. and the realization I was ready for a new job came at the same time, I decided it was time for a trip. I decided to check the big one off the list and go to Scotland.
With that, step 1 was in full swing. My parents joined in on the trip and my mom and I started planning. It was daunting. 3 weeks abroad in a place none of us had been before is a lot of moving pieces to nail down. The biggest thing was choosing our route and accommodation, which we planned based on the plane tickets we got and events we wanted to attend. The deciding factor for us was being able to catch the last Highland Games of the Summer in Pitlochry. This meant we were starting on the East Coast and driving down the West Coast.
Flights & Car: When we started looking at plane tickets, we were looking for a price that was reasonable with the added price of a car rental or one that bundled the two together for less than purchasing them separately. We found a bundle on British Airways and ended up paying about $3,600 total for three round trip tickets and our car for over three weeks. We did end up upgrading to a slightly larger car once we arrived in London to accommodate Kessi's bags when she joined us - this ended up costing about $400 more.
Our air route started PDX (Portland, OR)-DFW (Dallas, TX) & DFW-LHR (London Heathrow) where we would collect our car and start driving North. Our return trip originally followed the same route, but British Airways dropped the flight from LHR-DFW and instead routed us through ORD (Chicago, IL) with a shorter layover. Knowing we had to go through customs in Chicago, we were nervous about making our connecting flight home to Portland, but thought we could still make it. That is until our flight was roughly 10th in line for take off on one of the two runways in our terminal at LHR. So we left late, then the bags took almost a full hour to come through the carousel, and then our flight left without us. British Airways only had one person at the desk when we landed and the poor man obviously had not been fully trained yet. But he managed to get everyone who missed their connecting flight into a hotel with food vouchers so we ended up staying the night in Chicago with a handful of disgruntled strangers. We were all decidedly less disgruntled after a bit of dinner and sleep and had a nice chat on the morning shuttle back to the airport.
Our overall impressions of British Airways were that they are an established airline that handles issues well, but that also has issues often. The man at the desk said anyone coming out of LHR after about 11am will likely miss their connecting flight - would have been nice to know beforehand! We also noticed that there was a lot more monitoring on the British Airways flights - I've never had flight attendants check my seat belt so often! The crew did several full cabin sweeps to ensure everyone was wearing their seat belt throughout the course of the flight. I'm all for safety, but I definitely felt like they were a little overbearing. But overall, a fine experience and we would fly them again...maybe not through LHR again though ;)
Accommodation: We tried to stay under $100 dollars per night which is what led us to using Air BnB. Because there were 3 of us most of the time (4 once Kessi joined) it actually turned out to be much more cost effective to rent an entire place on Air BnB rather than two rooms at a hotel or other Bed & Breakfast. However, knowing what we know now, we definitely would have paid more money to have our accommodation closer to the places we wanted to go and be tourists at. Even though we had our own car, the driving there turned out to be so stressful and complicated at times that it would have been so much easier and more enjoyable to have been closer to the things wanted to do and do less driving.
Back to accommodation- Air BnB is awesome. We stayed in 10 different Air BnBs and out of all of them, only one was a place we couldn't wait to leave. The rest of them were very nice and accurately portrayed online. Again though, when we were planning and saw that our accommodation was only 30 minutes away from our planned activities, we thought it would be no problem. But getting places in the UK is very different from getting places here and if we were to do it again we would opt for accommodation much closer to our activities.
For those of you who have not used Air BnB before, at some places the hosts met us there, at others it was a completely self-run check in. We only had trouble with our very first one which was difficult to find and then was not very clean. The rest of them were perfect!
Summary: Air travel will never go as planned, but British Airways did a good job making up for it. Driving in the UK is hard - that is a whole other blog post, Air BnB is awesome!
Stay posted for more posts about our trip and the specific places we went and things we did.
Thanks for reading!
Netti
Flights & Car: When we started looking at plane tickets, we were looking for a price that was reasonable with the added price of a car rental or one that bundled the two together for less than purchasing them separately. We found a bundle on British Airways and ended up paying about $3,600 total for three round trip tickets and our car for over three weeks. We did end up upgrading to a slightly larger car once we arrived in London to accommodate Kessi's bags when she joined us - this ended up costing about $400 more.
Our air route started PDX (Portland, OR)-DFW (Dallas, TX) & DFW-LHR (London Heathrow) where we would collect our car and start driving North. Our return trip originally followed the same route, but British Airways dropped the flight from LHR-DFW and instead routed us through ORD (Chicago, IL) with a shorter layover. Knowing we had to go through customs in Chicago, we were nervous about making our connecting flight home to Portland, but thought we could still make it. That is until our flight was roughly 10th in line for take off on one of the two runways in our terminal at LHR. So we left late, then the bags took almost a full hour to come through the carousel, and then our flight left without us. British Airways only had one person at the desk when we landed and the poor man obviously had not been fully trained yet. But he managed to get everyone who missed their connecting flight into a hotel with food vouchers so we ended up staying the night in Chicago with a handful of disgruntled strangers. We were all decidedly less disgruntled after a bit of dinner and sleep and had a nice chat on the morning shuttle back to the airport.
Our overall impressions of British Airways were that they are an established airline that handles issues well, but that also has issues often. The man at the desk said anyone coming out of LHR after about 11am will likely miss their connecting flight - would have been nice to know beforehand! We also noticed that there was a lot more monitoring on the British Airways flights - I've never had flight attendants check my seat belt so often! The crew did several full cabin sweeps to ensure everyone was wearing their seat belt throughout the course of the flight. I'm all for safety, but I definitely felt like they were a little overbearing. But overall, a fine experience and we would fly them again...maybe not through LHR again though ;)
Accommodation: We tried to stay under $100 dollars per night which is what led us to using Air BnB. Because there were 3 of us most of the time (4 once Kessi joined) it actually turned out to be much more cost effective to rent an entire place on Air BnB rather than two rooms at a hotel or other Bed & Breakfast. However, knowing what we know now, we definitely would have paid more money to have our accommodation closer to the places we wanted to go and be tourists at. Even though we had our own car, the driving there turned out to be so stressful and complicated at times that it would have been so much easier and more enjoyable to have been closer to the things wanted to do and do less driving.
Back to accommodation- Air BnB is awesome. We stayed in 10 different Air BnBs and out of all of them, only one was a place we couldn't wait to leave. The rest of them were very nice and accurately portrayed online. Again though, when we were planning and saw that our accommodation was only 30 minutes away from our planned activities, we thought it would be no problem. But getting places in the UK is very different from getting places here and if we were to do it again we would opt for accommodation much closer to our activities.
For those of you who have not used Air BnB before, at some places the hosts met us there, at others it was a completely self-run check in. We only had trouble with our very first one which was difficult to find and then was not very clean. The rest of them were perfect!
Summary: Air travel will never go as planned, but British Airways did a good job making up for it. Driving in the UK is hard - that is a whole other blog post, Air BnB is awesome!
Stay posted for more posts about our trip and the specific places we went and things we did.
Thanks for reading!
Netti
Great adventure!
ReplyDeleteCan't wait to hear more
ReplyDelete