Luggage in Lugnasa?

My sister travels a great deal and is called the Dry-Cleaning Aunt by my other sister. This helps everyone keep the two of them apart since I tend to refer to both of htem as "my sister". "The Other Sister" (the one that is not the Dry-Cleaning Aunt) has so many names that we can't remember them all, but the moniker "Dry-Cleaning Aunt" certainly doesn't do my first sister justice. In truth, DCA does have  a lot of high maintenance clothing, but she works in the corporate world and has to be that way. She is fabulously professional, fabulously successful and of course fabulously chic ...and she buys her clothes at one of a kind places or sometimes just at Chic-oes.



I'm not kidding. If you google her, you find her in pictures with lots of famous people, Janet Reno, Mia Farrow, the Oceanographer Dr Sylvia Earle. She's always presenting people with plaques and money and therefore of course she is also fabulously popular.

Anyway, she must have done something dastardly in a previous life;  pulled the wings off of botflies, sabotaged world war one flying aces or destroyed the Hindenburg, because she has terrible airline karma. I'm not talking occasionally late on a flight or getting bumped from a flight. I'm talking seriously bad karma.  They lose her checked luggage EVERY SINGLE TIME she flies. I fly from time to time and I have had a bag not show up, once or maybe twice in the last 20 years of flying, so I know how annoying this is, but we aren't talking about a simple increased frequency of baggage loss here, they literally lose her bags EVERY SINGLE TIME she flies. She's used to this happening and hardly even thinks about it anymore.

  (link to cartoon here)

If she were anarchically inclined she could easily take out an entire airliner by packing the device in her checked Briggs and Rileys and feel completely secure that somewhere along the line her bags would go elsewhere while she landed safely on Easter Island. (And no she doesn't have Henk luggage, you don't spend $20,000 on a suitcase if you know it is going to get lost.)

When she can avoid it, she doesn't check luggage, she just packs everything important in a carry on. Still when she is off to the antarctic to see weddell seals and orca whales, she kind of needs to pack big heavy coats and boots and her harpoon doesn't fit in her carryon. (Okay, I admit, she doesn't have a harpoon - or at least if she does, she doesn't take it with her when she flies.)



When the airlines lose her baggage on the way home she feels it isn't SO bad, because most of the times her stuff eventually finds its way home, (but not always. She knows how to file insurance for missing suitcases in her sleep and has been known to do so when traveling across multiple travel zones.) When things go awry on the way TO her destination, however, that can be bothersome. She knows what it is like to spend two weeks on a birding exhibition in the Amazon with only her camera and the clothes on her back.

(Think: sticky, sweaty, yucky!) I can't tell you the number of gift souvenirs the airline has gotten to keep instead of me. (Okay, so maybe that is my karma!)

Anyway, I just got a call from Sister of the Many Names and Dry-Cleaning Aunt is back from two weeks in Northern Ireland.  Something tells me that I'm in for another really great story!

PS -  She's back and guess what? She must have balanced her Karma. She arrived on time, luggage in tact and had a wonderful time. Now isn't that the way things should be? (And even without losing something, she has been telling some fantastic stories!!)