Packing - and Schedule Complications

As Lena and I were packing our belongings into boxes, we realised how much had been accumulated over those past 10 years in Thousand Oaks. I kept driving to the local U-haul store in Newbury Park, picking up more and more boxes. As I was adding up the volume, it became clear that this would not fit all into one single 20 ft container as originally planned. Also, we realised that we would not be able to complete the packing in time for the originally set pickup date.


Piles of boxes in every room. 

As we tried to move the date by a few days, it turned out that we would also need to rearrange our flights back to Leeds. But my ticket on Delta was non-refundable, no changes allowed... I had to abandon it and get a new ticket. In order not to spend
money, I used my collected Northwest miles to get a free ticket. But I could not get a flight on Delta, instead I had to book on Continental.

Since I planned to be back in the US at the end of October for a conference in Santa Barbara, I arranged for roundtrip tickets. A single one-way ticket usually is four times more expensive: The price for a single one way ticket is in most cases double the price of a round trip ticket, so it is even cheaper to buy the round trip ticket and not use the return portion.

Still, for the return from Santa Barbara, I would need eventually one-way tickets. I found them with the Irish airline Air Lingus - they were the only one, where a single ticket costs actually half of the price of a round trip ticket. Very reasonable - so I bought the ticket there. Also, this is the very fastest way to fly from LA to the UK: leaving in the evening at 17:00 from LAX, then after a stopover in Dublin, arrival at Manchester the next day at 12:50. I have not found any faster flight.

So I booked our flights, moved the pickup date a few days later, and notified Leeds Met about my delayed return.