Our 10 day choir tour to Scotland
 

So I am leaving today on a ten day choir tour in Scotland . DH is coming along to enjoy the performances and we are sharing one checked bag and each have a 20” carryon plus the popular “personal item.” I have packed carefully, including choir robes for churches and attire for concerts. My carryon has my music folder, performance attire, and medications. DS2 is staying at our house while we’re gone to care for our elderly dogs who can no longer be boarded except at a vet’s. DS2 offers to help DH load the car. I see them bustling around the boot of the car, arranging bags and slamming down the hatch. We drive the hour to the Atlanta airport and they unload two suitcases. DS2 closes the hatch. WHERE IS MY CARRY ON BAG? DS and DH look at each other, then at me. It’s back at home.

DS is on his way now to pick up the suitcase and bring it back. He will not make it within the two hours ahead we were told to show up at the gate. OTOH, we have already got boarding passes and our checked bag is already loaded on the plane. We can’t go through security until I have the bag in hand. We are now sitting on a hard ledge since some management consultant has determined that removing all lobby seating from the restaurant area will encourage people to sit in the restaurants and buy food.

I have made no recriminations regarding this really inexplicable gaffe. All three suitcases were in the same area. Is the moral of this story not to rely on anyone for anything? To double check everything oneself, down to the most obvious details? Or just that sh!t happens? I am writing this to avoid opening my mouth, which may of its own accord say things best left unsaid. Thank you for reading.

Oh Sh...................ttt :( Kswl3. I feel your pain,
And yes - (1) the moral of the story is - load and unload everything yourself.
(2) It is a mystery how someone could miss 1 of 3 bags sitting together.

I recommend Jersey Caramels. They provide something sweet to chew on and prevent the opening of one's mouth, through which may issue words which, as you say may be best left unsaid at the moment.

Good Luck! xoxoxoxo

Thank you, Bokhara2 . I am working my way through a family size bag of Haribo and trying to appear as if I am not pretty royally ticked off. 🤬

What bokhara2 said, but not the Jersey Caramels! 😂 I would probably lose a tooth eating them and then add that to the troubles.

You poor thing, keep us posted

Oh man, nightmare indeed.

I suddenly don't feel so anal when I confirm with spouse, after he loads luggage..."two suitcases, two backpacks, yes?".

Fingers crossed on your behalf.

To heck with the candy, I suggest a G&T at the nearest airport bar.:cocktail:

Kwsl, the exact same thing happened to us (well, me, if truth be told) when we were in Tucson last year. Fortunately it was a domestic flight and our habit of getting to the airport early meant we had enough time, barely, to go back across town to our B&B, get the bag, and make it to our flight on time.

I feel your pain. Good luck.

It happened to us - once. That’s likely what will happen to you as well. Thank goodness for Haribo.

I hope it all works out for you. Enjoy Scotland, which will be beautiful at this time of year.

I have the carry on and am sitting at the gate, and although much later than the dictated time we are not even the last ones here. Thank heavens for the foibles of others! It’s heartening to read that we are not the only ones who have shown up at an airport minus a suitcase. Misery really does love company :D

Thank you for these well wishes. I have not been in Scotland since 2002 and am very excited. We are singing in a number of historic churches and will give recitals at Stirling Castle and another venue. Now that I have my music and robes I am breathing huge sighs of relief!

Lang may yer lum reek, lassie!

Happened to my parents once, by the taxi driver loading their luggage. They had to rush back home and there was their suitcase sitting in the driveway, duh!

Oh man, kswl3!!! I’m so glad your son saved the day!!!

Though not as stressful, it reminds me of a time years ago at Christmas when we drove all the way from Charlotte, NC to DC with our little girls and my suitcase wasn’t in the car when we arrived. I packed it, put it downstairs to load and have no idea how it was left behind but it was.

Great news you are reunited with your carryon kswl3. Enjoy your time in Scotland.

May this be the only problem in your trip!

I once left ALL of my clothes at home. I was distracted by packing food into coolers, and I forgot to bring downstairs the backpack containing my clothes. My bad. Luckily, it was "just" a trip to a cabin in the Sierra. I shopped at an outlet store and the local CVS. We ate well, and I had almost no laundry to do when I got home!

Have a wonderful trip!

Enjoy traveling with your choir in Scotland. Sorry you had to go all through all this unnecessary stress!!

You made it!! Have a wonderful trip.

We discovered three hours into the trip to Jackson Hole, and at 10 pm on the way, that we left all of our ski clothes in our “ski bag” on our bedroom floor.

Anyone want to loan long underwear? Coats? Ski pants? Helmets? Friends and family came through but the outfits were quite eclectic.

Great news that you & your carry-on bag are reunited!

A musician friend was relating the story on the weekend of a very similar trip with a school band. They were flying from Australia to England and somehow all of their luggage, including the instruments was put on the wrong plane and sent to somewhere in the US. Their first performance was scheduled the day after their arrival, so no time for retrieval of their instruments. Luckily, their host town was able to rustle up sufficient replacement instruments for their performances until theirs arrived a few days later.

Hope you have a wonderful trip - and count the bags on & off everything ;)

Air Tags?

Whew!

Oh gosh kswl3 - how worrying for you!
I toured in early 2023 with a choir (singing in the 'big' English Cathedrals) and I think I checked my carry on about every hour on the flight over.
All the best for what should be an amazing experience.
Guard the music and robes at all times.

haribou, good choice. Glad I'm reading after problem was solved or I would be thinking about what to do and glad it wasn't me. Your trip sounds wonderful. What a great way to visit a country.

kswl, I am impressed by your calmness. It sounds like a wonderful trip.

Unfortunately, I can relate. How does an intelligent person manage to leave one bag behind when it is sitting right there with all the other luggage?

My bag was the exact color of the duvet it was sitting on.

I'm impressed that you were able to avoid getting arrested for attempted murder.
Sounds like everything turned out splendidly & that you're enjoying your adventure!

Several years ago, my husband, traveling alone to visit his niece for a few days, left his carry-on at the check-in counter. He (the absent-minded professor if ever there was one) didn't even notice until he arrived at his destination. Fortunately his niece adores him; she whisked him to a store to buy a few essentials, managed to borrow some clothing from one of her neighbors, and a good time was had by all. I (the quintessential control freak) would not have been as sanguine as either of them.

About ten years after our divorce my ex and I drove our son to college far away.
he forgot to put my suitcase in the car. I had nothing with me!!

Years ago my sister and I took a long weekend trip with my parents to Vancouver. We were at the baggage carousel retrieving all our luggage and we had retrieved all but my dad's suitcase. Waiting, waiting, waiting. We had checked in separately so neither my sister nor I knew what had gone on during their arrival at the airport and check in. Something to note is that my mom is not the best traveler - she gets flustered easily, misplaces things and becomes defensive. But she always wants to be in charge. So my dad is asking if his suitcase was checked, she's insisting it was, but can't find the bag claim check. Now they're bickering and my sister and I are standing there rolling our eyes at each other. We call our other sister at home who goes to our parents' house and finds my dad's suitcase still sitting in the garage. So the next morning we had to find a store to buy enough things to get my dad through the rest of the trip - at least it was only a long weekend.

I still have and love the black sweats I had to buy on the fly—ankle length with a cute curve at the bottom. Fortunately black sweats can take you almost anywhere on the Oregon coast 🙂 We were hosting my parents too so I wanted to be on my best behavior about it.

Like others, I can certainly relate. We had returned from a few weeks at our cottage with one stop to eat. After unloading everything, my bag containing half my life - Meds, Kindle, camera and cellphone chargers, radio, etc. - was missing. Was it stolen at our stop? Was it still at the cottage? Panicking, I called my pharmacy, explained the dilemma and the pharmacist said to pick up my new meds in a hour. Relief! Tears dried.
Ten minutes after my call, the valet appeared with the missing bag. DH had taken it out of the car to inadvertently sit it behind a post while he unpacked the rest from the trunk. My call back to the pharmacist was epic in its apology. She was empathetic. I may have said something to DH.
Wishing you a stress-free vacation and much fun at your "gig."

Yes, we have them now. They have the "alert if left behind" feature.

Have a great trip kwsl, sounds amazing!

Well...there was the time spouse flew all the way from CO to the Maldives for a two week dive trip before he realized he forgot to pack his dive skin.

And his most recent trip - where I spent several hours contacting several airports trying to track down his misplaced Kindle. Thankfully, man and Kindle were reunited when he passed through one of said airports on his return.

Phfew, kswl3! My in-laws left their very carefully packed bag of medications home...from Kentucky to Ireland. Fortunately, they were able to replace everything in Ireland!

Happy singing.

Thank you all for your replies that are, severally, both gracious and funny!

DH and I had a very excellent lunch on the banks of the Forth river yesterday (I had a delicious chopped salad and bruschetta with sparkling water followed by a decent currant scone and a latte). We had been taken on a “highlights” tour of the city in the coach and deposited at the riverfront for exploring and a meal on our own before we were able to check into our hotel,The Mercure. It seems to be a hotel that caters to groups; well located on the Royal Mile and our double room is really nice, with updated furnishings and a super modern bathroom. It has a good street view to the northeast with unrelenting summer light.

Last night we had a group welcome dinner at the Amber Restaurant in a small private room. DH stayed behind to sleep while I went with the others on the coach. We will have mostly one driver and one assigned handler from the Performance International travel agency, a brisk older woman named Anita (by whom we are all a bit cowed, to be honest).

Dinner was enjoyed by all. I ate sparingly, just a few bites of the potato, roasted carrot and boneless chicken breast stuffed with “vegan haggis,” which seemed to be mostly a farrow-like grain. Dessert was a very dense unfrosted chocolate cake strewn with a few nuts, not overly sweet (thankfully) and I had a small but very good coffee with it.

We got back to the hotel around 9 pm. I resolved the pajama issue by deciding to shower in the evening. Most days we will be changing hotels so there won’t be much chance to send anything out to launder, and I brought only two sets of pjs when for this length of time I would normally go through three. (If that is TMI, sorry! I find I am as interested in the nuts and bolts of how people travel as in what they see and do).

Because I am an early riser and won’t be doing my usual Spelling Bee / Letter Boxed routine until later in the day I am using this time to write down the events of the previous day. It is likely to be boring in the extreme, no need to read and comment if it seems as dull as watching paint dry or (shudder) golf on tv!

I wonder if your riverfront meal was in South Queensferry. My grandfather was born there and lived there until he moved to Australia when he was quite a young man.

Have a great trip! And please keep the updates coming.

Letterboxed: I hate it. One of my barre instructors and I compare notes every day on The NY Times games. My husband and barre instructor love Letterboxed, but I get frustrated and quit after about five minutes.

I also have thoughts on pajamas.

Left pay parking lot in Mestre and drove to Varenna. DH’s backpack w camera, passport etc had been left on the
ground when he packed the trunk. So…no way of finding a lost and found esp. with no Italian so he left me and
went full- tilt all the way back to Mestre in a total panic.

Proving miracles still occur in Italy the bag, intact, was still on the ground where he left it.

The same man left his backpack on a chair in a small Austrian village. Didn’t discover it missing until we were
a good 15 min. away. We were on a tour bus and we returned to the cafe with 25 tourists, a guide and a driver.
Again, it was still on the chair.

In Turkey he left his watch in a cubbie at a hammam and another full tour, driver and guide drove us back to
retrieve it.

KSWL,
I was once covering the Berlin Wall tear-down for a local newspaper (my one and only front-page article). Got so wrapped up in *chats with East German soldiers through wall gaps that I absent-mindedly left my Domke camera bag behind on the nearby ground. It had my 'everything', passport, tape recorder, money plus more. Back on the bus, I suddenly noticed the missing bag, then did a Usain Bolt back to the spot. Luckily, it was still there. My possessions would've represented a fair find for any unscrupulous East German, so I was grateful.
*some of those chats were tape-recorded for posterity.

I am done. the travel nightmares

immimi - sounds like that "same man" has been pretty lucky.

My neighbor, who was a bit of an over-planner, arrived at JFK and found that her plane tickets were not in her bag.
Fortunately, since there was plenty of time before her scheduled departure, she came back home..... JFK to upper East Side...
. A search there revealed no tickets. A further search revealed they were in her bag -:(. She still made it in time for the plane.
The good side of compulsive behavior!

More great tales of suitcases and other necessities forgotten and trips still managed, it seems almost everyone has a similar story!

Cathies it was indeed Queensferry, and we ate at the Railbridge Cafe. That’s a nice little area but they have quite a bit of disruption from cruise ships. I suppose it has helped the local economy but there are obvious drawbacks also.

Yesterday was our only free day and there was an included morning visit to Edinburgh castle. DH stayed behind to sleep and I went with the group. It was interesting, but I have to say at my age I have seen a fair number of medieval castles and did not gain any new insight, which may just be me getting mentally lazy. We met at 11:30 in the tiny St. Margaret’s Chapel to sing There is a Balm in Gilead (Moses Hogan) and recite the Our Father to put on the church Facebook page. Not everyone managed to get there but the sound was nevertheless beautiful and uplifting in that lovely stone barrel vault. I had a snack in the on-site cafe and made my way back to the hotel around 1 pm. Dh and I made a few trips out to get the right combination of converters and plugs for my hot air hair styling brush and the portable steamer I brought to do everyone’s robes before Saturday Evensong. One could make a good case that both small appliances are completely unnecessary and I freely admit that one is pure vanity on my part but the other is because we have no designated robe mistress. I had originally (and naively) thought the robes would all travel together in a couple of checked trunks and overseen by a single person but we are each responsible for our own. I knew they would be wrinkled by the time they were needed and volunteered to steam them for anyone who wanted. When we got here my dual voltage steamer did not work, so … mundane errands.

We did a bit of walking around after appliancegate was resolved and had an uninspired dinner at the hotel. I had spaghetti bolognese, garlic bread and salad and DH had pizza. We were both craving carbs, I guess. His meal was okay, my salad and garlic bread were were good but I will say the pasta was not Marcella Hazan’s by a long stretch. I ate half of it and it was filling. We were joined by the choirmaster and his wife who had a quick dessert and whiskey while we were waiting for our dinner and it was nice to be able to spend some down time with them. When we were ready to leave we found they had paid for our dinner on their way out which was a lovely surprise.

We are checking out of the hotel at 7:30 this am and going to Lindisfarne. We have two sings today, one at noon and one later in the afternoon, and we will check in to the Milennium Hotel in Glasgow around 5 pm. Our hotel situation has been complicated by the presence of Taylor Swift who gives concerts in Edinburgh tonight, tomorrow and Saturday, The town is crawling with Swifties and they are a colorful, enthusiastic, well-behaved lot, which is about the best thing you can say of thousands of visitors.

Glad it all worked out in the end.

Gwendolynn's story about the tickets being in the bag all along is quite common. I have heard many similar stories - people in a panic to find keys or wallets before leaving house, etc. So my ears perked up when a speaker talked about cognitive load theory. Mishaps easily happen if cognitive load demands get too high. I'll take a stab at how he would see this task of loading the bags.

You say, One shared checked bag plus 2 carryons plus 2 'personal items' = 5 bags. iF one person does all of the loading, AND they want to keep things conceptually simple: then they choose to do the task as 1 bag times 5 trips, so that so keeping conscious awareness of just the number of trips taken to the car will suffice to count the bags as well.

But this is a young, strong man. He will be easily tempted try to do TWO things - load all the bags AND minimize the number of trips. Save energy physically and maybe save time but definitely don't save on cognitive load, because now he's got to compute what combinations of bags he will take per trip.

If he organized the bags into as many pairs as possible first, then start with the outlier (the checked bag) and then do two pairs, that's the simplest conceptually. Except the bag that was left behind a carryon, i.e. was one of a pair. So, obviously, the pair of carryons were split. It could have happened like this:
Grab the checked bag and oh, I can manage one more thing, or maybe you or spouse took a personal item into the car. Now DS has to track what you loaded as well as himself.
Yeesh, thinking it out, it's not surprising bags being left behind are not all that uncommon.