This months fun and frolics is a whole series of trips to Bucharest.

There is a very long back story to this which I will not bore everyone with but suffice to say that due to a whole series of youthful misadventures I have worn dentures for the past 40 years. A recent conversation between colleagues in Romania and the UK opened my eyes to the concept of dental tourism and after a bit of research I had a ‘now or never’ decision as to whether I should embark on what would effectively be a complete dental rebuild. Clearly given this trip report, the decision was ‘now’!

Since March of this year I have been back and forth to Bucharest six times for many various procedures and remedial work, and the squeamish should skip to the next paragraph. In total I have spent at least 40 hours in the chair and have had 4 bone grafts - both natural and artificial, 8 implants, 9 root canals, 16 pieces of metal in my jaw, some of which were later removed again, many extractions, and various bits lasered, ground, scoured, sutured, reopened, re-sutured, and polished. I have had a team of six dentists doing this work including my overarching consulting dentist, 2 surgeons, a hygienist, an orthodontist, and a periodontist, plus all of the supporting personnel. Each and every one of them has been amazing. The intrusive work is now complete and we are on to the Hollywood Smile part

All of this travel meant that I achieved BA executive club gold status organically before my tier year ended in September. This upcoming tranche of travel will give me BA gold status again through to September 2025.

The trip report will cover all of these backward and forwards to Bucharest. The last three weeks will be predominantly flight and lounge reports, but there will be quite a bit of tourism next week if all goes to plan. That plan is:

Return home Friday by train from Guildford as early as possible to get laundry, repacking, etc done after being away from home for the past 13 days
BA Holiday Saturday-Friday with 2 planned dentist appointments Monday and Thursday (480 tier points)
Normal flight booking the following Friday to Sunday, with one dentist appointment Saturday (240 tier points)
BA holiday covering the following 2 weekends (960 Tier points)
- Friday NCL-LHR-OTP, Sunday OTP-LHR/LCY-EDI EDI-NCL LNER with one dentist appointment Saturday
- And finally Thursday NCL-EDI LNER, Friday EDI-LHR-OTP, Sunday OTP-LHR-NCL with 1 back-up/check-up dentist appointment Saturday

In the last round of BA schedule changes a lot of my flights were cancelled and rescheduled so some of the flight timings will seem odd, it was not my first choice! It does, however, mean there will be at least one complete lounge safari in T3 which will be fun for me and, I hope, interesting to anyone reading the report.

Signing off for now, see you all on Saturday Morning.