The way I figure it, leaving New York on Sunday at 4:40 PM meant, under the best conditions, that there’d be a long, sleepless flight to Amsterdam. We landed there early – at 5:30 AM instead of 6 AM. For those of you who consider time zones the bane of our existence (as do I) that translated to 11:30 PM Eastern Daylight Time. It also meant that our 6 1/2 hour layover in Amsterdam became 7 hours. Now, you might well ask why anyone in their right mind would book a flight like that? Well, there were two of us traveling together and our preferred seats weren’t available on any flight with a shorter layover unless I was willing to take a layover of about 45 minutes in Amsterdam. If you’ve been through the Schiphol airport, you might understand my hesitancy in taking that route.

The flight was pleasant enough although I wasn’t happy about the movie selection – I started watching two and gave up and read a book instead. I couldn’t get online – unlike Delta, KLM doesn’t have free Wi-Fi access for anything except messaging through phone apps. I also discovered that our booking, made through Delta didn’t carryover our choice of a special meal. That’s the first time I experienced that. Since we weren’t entering the EU we didn’t have to go through passport control in Amsterdam, but the line in Glasgow to use their electronic passport system took more than half an hour. I was nervous about the whole passport thing since, although we had acquired the U.K. electronic travel authorization (ETA), which promised to be linked to our passports, I had no way to know in advance whether it actually worked.

It’s now 4:45 PM in Glasgow – that’s 11:45 Eastern Daylight Time, on Monday – a day after we left New York. The hotel is very nice and in a perfect locale, but there was a challenge checking in. This was quickly resolved thanks to Angus and Matt at the reception desk. When I first booked the hotel many months ago, I cancelled the reservation within minutes. I don’t remember why I did that because half an hour later I rebooked. Payment was in full. I couldn’t figure out a way to book this hotel or almost any other without paying in advance. Apparently because of what I did, the system cancelled both reservations, although it didn’t refund the second payment. When I travel I usually print out hotel/car/ticket payments and reservations. I know it seems like overkill, because I do have the emails somewhere. This time printing out the information really saved me. It took a few minutes, but all was quickly resolved.

The weather is, of course, warmer than anticipated. This means, once again, the clothes I have with me are, for the most part, not quite what I needed. No surprise there. I know some of you are laughing because it’s inevitable.