Let It Lingus

Hello again. I was inundated with a message last week regarding the lack of a post last Sunday. I’m grateful for anyone giving a toss of course but I just gave myself, and perhaps more mercifully, you the day off from another post with me spouting uneducated guesses about things that are unknown. The day was filled with other stuff (mainly mowing tbh) so I just chose not to burden myself and others with the blogging thing.

Things still aren’t known of course but I’m back at it, whether I or you like it.

To quote a random millennial from off of Instagram, with regards to this bloody holiday I have been at the “I can’t even…” stage for a while. We’re all still here with no clue as to what and when the US might do and our own government, unable to avoid snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, have somehow enabled a variant to instigate a climb in case numbers that could very well be putting Biden off letting us in.

Over in the States they are doing their best to remove all the stuff that was putting us off from going, with restrictions being removed quicker than EU citizens from the UK. Yet still, perhaps understandably with the UK having impregnated itself with this new variant for no good reason, they may well now be reticent to let us in.

Biden is over here in early June and it may well be then that we learn some more about if and when us dirty infected Brits can once more eat ourselves into diabetes in a Dennys.

Our loose and tentative plans for September have remained in place, as much as they could with zero financial commitment for a while now. Then, on Thursday the stars aligned and some real world stuff we’d been waiting to hear about fell into place and despite the nagging voices in my head telling me not to do it to myself again, flights were soon thereafter secured.

It will not be a surprise for anyone that we have still not had our refund from Virgin for our now cancelled June flights. With it now being over two weeks since I got their email confirming my request for a refund, I got in touch. Many hours passed and it turned out they had no record of my request for a refund. Seemingly they had just randomly emailed me about a refund I had not requested, confirming that I had requested it.

I re-requested it. We wait some more.

Anywho, luckily Aer Lingus, who will have the honour of carrying my not inconsiderable frame across the Atlantic, offered a deposit only booking with more flexible options for cancelling and/or moving than you could shake a Shillelagh at. So I feel as comfy as you can these days that whatever happens we’ll be OK.

I had tidied up the last piece of the June cancellations this week, being a month out from our intended Vero stay I was allowed to convert that into a credit note for future use. I got those credit notes on Friday and have started the process of rebooking our days at Vero this time in September.

Outside of holiday news, now we are allowed, we’ve done things like have Rebecca, Tom and Freddie for tea last Sunday and Freddie even stayed over at ours on Tuesday night. That’s been lovely.

I’ve done another five hours of mowing on our field and it already looks like it needs doing again. This is mainly because it has rained constantly, apart from the five hours I spent mowing, since April. I am also delighted to report that the frustrating WiFi woes we have been battling since we moved in have been defeated by my technical genius. Well, I say technical genius. I spent £40 on a new router from Amazon and a 30m ethernet cable to run to my office. Anywho, on our wireless network pre-upgrade I was getting 7 Mbps and after 70Mbps. That is the single most impressive thing I have done for many a year. Plusnet, the routers you provide are a bit shit. FYI.

Work has been a bugger recently. Lots of plates spinning, some coming very close to hitting the ground and one of my team had some horrendous family news this week and we’ve been supporting him through that in whatever way we can. It’s seems churlish of me to complain about work in light of that, but I suppose I still will.

So, in summary. We go again, again. My planner is rejigged once more and it has been so that often that it is dizzy. I had, despite the lack of interest and belief that we’d be allowed to go in September, booked theme part reservations for our September dates so that’s all good. I am now beginning to fill up the days with the important stuff. Where are we eating?

This is trickier than normal as many on-site places remain closed but we only really want two of those, Sanaa and O’hana and I’m hopeful they will be open at least by the time we go. Whether we can get an ADR remains to be seen. Other than that our list will include all of our Greatest Hits such as –

Cowfish

Hash house a go go

Teak Neighbourhood Grill

Romano’s

Olive Garden

Bahama Breeze

Cheesecake Factory

With some new ones for us, such as Antojitos at City Walk.

For all our sakes let us hope that this is it now and we get to do this trip. It is now a war of attrition and I will either have this holiday or bore everyone to death trying.

Till the next time……