Panic and Relief...

... Phew!!!

I can cross a few more items of my To-Do List (I'm doing that right now, including the book reading ;)

Today's item was hard to achieve, though... and nerve racking. Mostly because trying to book award travel tickets with United Airlines is incredibly difficult! After waiting for the necessary miles to be credited to our account, we tried to call them last night to book the boys' tickets and we were on hold for ONE FULL HOUR with that annoying music & announcement music playing before we simply gave up.

And the whole time I was panicking because I'd just checked the mileage booking online and I could only see travel for 110,000 miles on the dates we needed to travel whereas 10 days ago there were 60,000 mile seats available.

Tonight we tried to call again and costumer service picked up after less than five minutes. It was an Indian lady -- I don't know whether from a call-center in India or here, I don't really care, I was just delighted that she picked up my call -- and she was really patient trying to look up flights for me for nearly an hour before we finally decided on a date.

In the end, we're flying only a week after our desired date, on the 4th of July, but the trip is through Toronto (way longer)! :( Now I need to get ALL the information to the travel agent that works for the university and I hope that the office who awarded me the grant can agree to pay for a much higher (by 800 dollars) airfare than I had originally anticipated. Even if the grant money gets to cover only airfare and one car rental in Brazil, that will be fine with me, since I am able to travel with my family.

I'm very relieved that it all worked out, I just hope my travel authorization can be processed soon (I hadn't submitted it yet because I wanted to know how much  my airfare would cost before filling out the form), in spite of the fact that it will have to be signed by the university president! Keep your fingers crossed for me so that it all works out in the end.