Day 9, Year 7: Mad (at a) Dog
Date: Thursday, November 17, 2011
Weather: Overcast with Drizzle, Freezing Tonight
Location: Brewer Fiddler’s Cove Marina, N Falmouth, Massachusetts
Okay. I’m not talking about cheap wine. I’m mad at a dog-a greyhound to be specific. On October 29 we booked our bus trip to New Mexico via Greyhound on the phone. Mark talked and I wrote down the schedule and confirmation number. We were told that the tickets would be coming in the mail. We waited, and waited, and waited, and finally at the end of last week I got on the web and found that tickets my mail take at least ten working days, not counting holidays and weekends. That meant that Monday of this week would be the arrival date. No ticket. Tuesday, no ticket. So we looked up numbers to call to check on this. After hours of trying to reach someone other than a computer, tonight Mark talked to a man who said our reservations had been cancelled because we didn’t pick our tickets up at our local Greyhound station. I remember vividly Mark giving Heather’s address to the woman with whom we booked our trip. She definitely told him the tickets would come by mail. By the time we found out that our reservations have been cancelled it was too late to reach Customer Service tonight. So we will try at 7 AM as the gentleman we did talk to suggested. Greyhound certainly took our money and we certainly have no tickets and the current price of the same tickets is much higher than we paid. We have no idea what Customer Service is going to tell us. We have been searching all evening trying to compare current bus ticket prices with air and train tickets, but the bus still comes out cheaper even though it is now $300 more than when we booked in October. If Greyhound tells us that they will not refund our money, there is no way we can afford to go to New Mexico for Christmas. If that happens I am certainly going to be more than mad at the dog, I will be on the war path with Greyhound.
Mark went to the hospital for a stress test early this morning. He’s been very short of breath on our morning walks and decided he should have things checked out. His blood pressure is great, the EKG looked good, but he was a short-timer on the tread mill. The cardiologist thinks there is no problem with his heart, but they are doing a different kind of stress test next Tuesday to be sure. In the meantime, they prescribed an inhaler thinking that the shortness of breath might be caused by asthma. And now I am wondering if the down comforter we are sleeping under and that has been stored on the boat as we circumnavigated might be the culprit. His problems started right after we started sleeping under the comforter. I think we’ll freeze if I take away the comforter tonight as the temp for those of us at the water’s edge is supposed to dip below freezing for the first time this fall. But things will warm up a bit tomorrow and I will switch to polar fleece blankets for a few days to see if that makes a difference. In the morning we will walk after Mark uses the inhaler and that will give us a chance to see if it really makes a difference.
As I sit here writing this log, I can hear the wind picking up outside. So it is going to be a windy night as well as a freezing one. I’m just happy that the forecast calls for warming temperatures over the weekend and into next week. I hoping for the warmest New England Thanksgiving of the century!
