Planning a Vacation isn't the Vacation

We're off to Europe for 3 weeks coming up in mid-May. It's very round about how we ended up selecting this as a vacation for this year, but in short, my daughter asked us to come on her vacation, and that lead to a trip where we plan do London - Paris - Lyon - Nice - Venice - Florence - Rome - London - home.

I like planning vacations. It's fun researching places to visit, and in this case, because I've been to all of these places before, the planning has been a bit easier. But it hasn't been a vacation. For instance...

Air Transat has changed both our outbound and some of our return flights since we booked them. They cancelled the outbound, necessitating a departure a day earlier. Now, an extra day in London is no penalty, but it did create the need to find a hotel there, and plan a day or so in the city. And...

As of this moment, Air Transat appears to have lost KC's and my seat reservations for the flight from Gatwick back to Calgary. The ones we paid for. And had arranged before they changed our flights. And...

We wanted to stay in Florence in the great little hotel we found last time we were there. It's still there, but has gone from €55 to €155 per night. And...

I made two errors in arranging train tickets. First, we arrive in Lyon Perrache station, but leave from Lyon Part Dieu station -- the two are separated by about 5 km. So I had to sort out the public transit system in Lyon, a town noted for its lack of English. And...

Second, even though I know better, and thought I checked, our tickets have us arriving in Venice Mestre, not Venice Santa Lucia. The latter is on the island. The former is 10 km away on the mainland. RailEurope said "just stay on the trai and plead ignorance if they say something." And..

Finding a hotel in Nice was a breeze. So, too, was Lyon, Venice and Florence. London and Rome took us several hours of searching each. Gatwick (where we are stuck for a night) was the hardest of all. Go figure. And...

The only vacation window that would work for Chesley requires me to leave KC and Chesley in Florence and fly home while they tootle off to Rome. And...

Well, let's just say that the trivial little details of trip planning are fun, but at the same point in time, the trip will be more so.