A twenty year adventure and more

Full disclosure, everything worked out okay, but sometimes, everything just goes against you.

The first couple days overseas have been a bit of a low key horror show. The first glitch was when we couldn’t book train tickets to get us the heck out of London; but okay, that got resolved, though not ideally.

The next issue of course was getting the heck out of Paris. There’s a longer story here, that really feels like something off of a Punked episode, or a “nightmare vacations” podcast. I honestly would never believe it had it not happened to me but…. The reality of our world is that a LOT of things have to be booked online, and henceforth with a credit card. Vacation rentals, advance train tickets (which is really any and all high speed trains, and etc) all need a credit card to secure in advance. And credit card security is an important thing, but what if your credit card is too secure?

So, this is a long story that I’m going to.abbreviate for levity. Our credit cards send security text messages when we make a purchase that is questionable: aka “was this you? Your security number is …..” to which I need to then enter the security I number into a page to say “yes Visa. That was me. It’s all cool.”

But we were not receiving text messages. At all.

So, roughly 1000 miniutes were soent on hold with Visa, (primarily) talking to RBC customer service, and no less than 25 emails were sent to various bankers we know to try to resolve the problem. Yeah…. 1000 miniutes. That’s roughly 16 hours we spent on the phone over the last three days, just so we could buy bloody train tickets!

And the answer we got over and over? There’s nothing we can do. You’re on you own. So we could tap anywhere (great), but online purchases were a no-go, and as such we couldn’t get to our rentals, move on with our trips and etc because we couldn’t book train tickets, which was the primary issue. No transportation on a train trip = bad news.

Okay. So we’ve been told now by no less that 7 specialists that were totally fucked, and they’re very sorry for us. That ain’t gonna work. So I call a business associate, saviour, whatever, and he says… why aren’t you getting texts? That’s the real question. Our home lines were turned on, our data Rian turned on, our network selection Automatic, all good. So why weren’t we getting text messages? Why…? Why….? Well, because we never enabled “Easy Roam” on our stupid f-ing phones.

Sixteen hours of phone calls (in three days on vacation), twenty five (give or take emails to various bakers/groups/service provides and etc), and this one last resort just says … wait… why?

So Easy Roam gets turned on with our MyTelus app and boom, dozens of text messages saying “was this you?” Fuck yes Visa!! Yes it was me!!!!

Anyway, that’s the short story of how the major financial crisis issue got resolved after a ridiculous amount of stress, tears, anger and fear (no one wants to be stranded in a foreign land with no accommodation) but the take home is: a) never trust Visa and b) don’t ever go anywhere you can’t get security text messages (and no, he wouldn’t send the text to our European number, no there is no option to get a message to email, and no there was literally no workaround if we could not receive the texts). Terrifying.

So anyway, that’s been happening, but it’s now resolved. Thank baby JC.

Otherwise we’ve been having a great time. I’ve been moderately good at not crying in front of the kids, and time change meant all the call happened between 9pm and 2am for the most part. Let’s hear it for faking coolness! Yay!

We did have a good time nonetheless. We climbed the Eiffel Tower (on foot), went to the Louvre in pouring rain (an easy miss if I ever came back – way too crowded and there is so much art in Europe why waste a day), and saw the Palace of Versailles (likely a highlight of the trip, a feast for my eyes and architecture loving soul – truly like nothing I’ve ever seen before and very worth the money in my opinion).

We also saw an old friend for dinner on Sunday night who was very understanding, and sympathetic to the fact that I was on the phone with Visa literally all night. “Nice to see you! It’s been 20 years!! I just have to take this four hour call with Visa…” unfortunately we were very late as a wrong train line led us to disembarking about a half hour Uber ride away. Thanks Nathaniel for a truly harrowing ride. I only thought we were dead two or three times. “Two stars. Got us there safely (?), didn’t mind the smell when we pissed ourselves in terror.”

Today after we resolved our stupid (my fault) problem was actually quite lovely, We took the RER (kind of like the GO train) from Versailles to Paris, and walked from Notre Dame to Gare de l’Est to catch our now prebpoked (yay!) train to Strasbourg.

Along the way we found some spectacular hidden gems, and watched a few semi-pro games of Boule (bocci) in the park – a real experience which was made better by the fact that we were being as watched and spectated by the players, as they were by us! I can o nnly imagine their thoughts…. A family of backpackers watching our games in this random park. Who are they? Where are they from? Why do they look like they’ve been put through the ringer?

Needless to say after all the drama, we arrived at the train station early to catch our train. No need for hurry, let’s be stressless from now on! And so we shall.

The ride was uneventful at 315km/h. The kids caught up on homework in the train, and I learned that the Louvre , built in 1100-something is over 3000m long if you walked from one end to the other! You could fit the Eiffel Tower in it more than 20x! That’s a LOT of art.

So key takeaways are:

-Break it down to imple questions when there’s a problem no one can resolve

-Avoid the Louvre on Mondays (it’s also the only museum open in Paris on Mondays)

Trust that it will get better

Fake it when it doesn’t.

This is all a true story. To be clear, we are all sorted now. I wanted to wait to post this one to make sure we had a positive outcome., and we do. Tomorrow: a low key day in Strasbourg and a quick jump across the Passerelle des Deux Rives so we can say we’ve been to Germany! That’s the plan anyway, but let’s see what happens next,