Well, I knew that it was coming, but there is always that little glimmer of hope that the airline won't try to feed it to you up the hoop for transporting your bike on the way to a race. The most depressing part of it all is that sometimes it costs nothing, and other times they want hundreds of dollars. When I went to Chile, they didn't charge us a penny on the way down and then only 75 bucks on the way back. When I went o Brazil, I got charged 150 on the way down and then 350US on the way home. Today, we got charged 175/bike, which seemed like a deal since we talked them down from 350/bike.
But, I should go back to the beginning. We arrived at the airport 3 hours before our departure in anticipation of troubles with the airline. When we got to the front of the check-in line, we had a very friendly and helpful agent. She was going to only charge us a 60 dollar flat rate per bike and she offered us an opportunity to take a later flight (because they oversold our flight) and we could get either 400 euros in travel vouchers or 300 euros in cash! It was too good to be true! Then, reality came back to kick us in the groin when we were told that we couldn't go on the other flight because of our bikes (the other flight had too much cargo or something like that) and the manager of the lady who was trying to help us out came down on her hard and came to tell us that he was going to charge us 350/bike. Then, when I asked him to explain the pricing to me, he tried to brush me off (bad mistake...) but I persisted. He stormed off to some back room and then came back to tell us that we could bring the bikes for a mere 175 dollars a piece... I can't wait to see how much they ask for when we come back. My stoker said that they tried to charge him over 600 euros for his bike one time!
So, then we get to the airport and one of the pieces of luggage didn't arrive. So, we had to wait for the other pilot to fill out the forms for a lost bag etc and went out to the waiting area expecting to see our ride waiting for us. Turns out that even though we got to the waiting area an hour late, our ride still wasn't there to pick us up. I won't go into details, but the transport was supposed to be arranged 2 days before we got there and I am just about to get into the van now that is now 3 hours late... I really need to sleep.
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2 comments:
Hey Devon, maybe we should teach your mom how to post comments in more recent articles. Sorry, I'm just bugging ya.
So how many bikes are you bringing on this trip? Three? four? Also, what is your stockers name? I am begining to think of him as some all powerful mythical character.
Keep the updates coming; I'm spreading the word to the blogging community.
Ya, I know, I should be in bed. Sorry.
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