July 17, 2024
Freshly back from our family vacation to Ireland and feeling refreshed and exhausted all at the same time!
I’d like to paint you the perfect family holiday picture where because I’m a Travel Advisor everything went perfectly. Unfortunately, that is far from the truth. We had arguably one of the rockiest starts to a trip that I’ve ever had but through it all we kept seeing (Irish) blessings along the way.
To catch you up (if you aren’t following us on social media)…we had 2 cancelled flights delaying our arrival by 24 hours and when we did arrive, they had lost our luggage. Talk about a triple whammy with 4 kids in tow!
However, remember those blessings I was talking about?
IRISH BLESSING #1: We bought travel insurance – we had a pretty packed first day planned with tours, tickets, 2 hotel rooms as well as needing 6 clean outfits and toiletries…costing over $2,000. Thankfully, we bought the insurance (which you never hope to need but is there when you need it) so we will get that all money back.
IRISH BLESSING #2: We knew exactly what to do when our flight got cancelled – we were the first in the never-ending line at the airport to help get us rescheduled on the next flight and to get a hotel room (at 3:00am). If you can’t be the first in line, be the first on the phone to contact the airline customer service directly. I have found the airline app is typically the last to update the airline status and they won’t rebook you until the flight has been ‘officially’ cancelled.
IRISH BLESSING #3: Our luggage arrived within 24 hours of landing – I had bought unique luggage tags that are quickly identifiable as well as taken a picture of all of our checked luggage so I had key pieces of information to provide the airline to assist with them locating and tracking it down.
And there were countless more blessings! The only thing you can do in these situations is stay calm and control what you can control. There were plenty worse off people around us so we considered ourselves lucky and played every hopscotch game in the airport possible to entertain the kids. ☘️
Here are a few pictures of our amazing trip (once we got there):
We adored Ireland and the memories we made as a family are priceless 💗