The Giant Jigsaw Puzzle

On my computer sits a grid with all the days of our Europe trip laid out in calendar form. Each box in the grid is slowly getting filled in with details that are colour coded. Text in black is stuff that has been booked and confirmed, the things set in stone. Text in blue are details that have been worked out quite specifically, but aren't booked and confirmed yet - this is mostly because some of our travel plans, such as rail travel, can't be booked more than 3 months in advance. Text in red are tentative plans that need to be firmed up, but some of this is dependant on travel plans being confirmed. What we are finding is that in order for us to fit one piece of the journey together, another piece needs to be in place. If transportation or accommodation problems change the grid in one place, it has a ripple effect throughout the whole picture. So the past week there has been a lot of moving things around. Let me give you an example.

Beth already mentioned that accommodation on Iona has been a bit problematic, our first choices not being available at all, and our second choice only being available for two days (instead of the three we were originally planning for). So after talking about this situation we decided that two days on Iona would be fine, but now this meant finding out if Glengorm Castle on the Isle of Mull could take us a day earlier, and figuring out all the ferry, bus and train schedules to see if they could all fit together. Yesterday it became apparent that the current bus schedule on the Isle of Mull would not give us much time at Glengorm, that would be a waste of that opportunity. So I began to look at alternative transportation possibilities.

There aren't really a lot of options, this is a fairly remote part of Scotland that is sparsely populated (for example there are only 120 full time residents on Iona). In my searching for the answer to the transportation part of this jigsaw puzzle I found a small aircraft service with regular flights from Tobermory to Glasgow. According to the schedule on the Airlines' web page, this option would be perfect, and while being quite a bit more money than the bus, ferry and train combination, it would also be a great experience. We were excited! So I sent an email to the little airline called Loch Lomond Seaplanes, only to get a reply today stating that they've already sold their quota of one-way tickets. So that puzzle piece gets removed and we start over. Fortunately I also got an email this morning from the bus company on Mull, and the summer schedule for the bus includes more options than currently indicated on their website. So things might work out with the bus after all - but we have to wait for two or more weeks until the summer schedule is finalized and published (either that or hope that the airline opens up some more one-way tickets).

At this point our first three weeks in Europe are now mostly indicated with black text on our Travel Calendar, there is still a bit of blue and red, but things are coming together nicely. We are also at a point where planning, for the most part, has to be put on hold, at least until Beth's new passport arrives. The next big question is if we can book a ferry from England to Denmark on a certain day, but they require both our passport numbers. Hopefully the passport will arrive sometime next week.

In the meantime we will keep working away at some of the details we can figure out. This planning process has been mostly fun and exciting, but also at times frustrating and patience-testing. I can't imagine how people did this before the era of the internet - probably a lot more package tours, or relying on relatives in Europe, or simply seeing how it worked out once there. I suppose if one had lots of time and money that last option would be the least stressful and perhaps the most fun, but we have limited time and financial resources so the Giant Jigsaw Puzzle will continue to be the method for us.

P.S. I was going to create an image of the travel calendar I've created to post on this Blog so folks could see what I was talking about. I thought I should update a few things before I did that including putting Flight Numbers on... then I discovered the problem! On the Air Miles Itinerary page, showing our travel information there were two flights listed to Toronto. One was for the time we had chosen (it was marked 'Unconfirmed'), one was for earlier in the day (this one was marked 'Confirmed'). This confused me, so a call to Air Miles was in order. Good thing I did! It turns out that Air Canada no longer has the flight that would have left at 1:55 PM, and thus the only option left for us is the flight that leaves at 11:00 AM. This is not ideal because it means we will have to miss the Luther College Baccalaureate Service, but there's not much we can do about it at this point. Thus the Giant Jigsaw Puzzle gets reworked a bit more!