4 Months 'till Take-Off

4 months to go and our flights and all our accommodation is booked. We will be flying Emirates again and we will be staying mostly in apartments with hotels for the single night stays in Inverness, Glasgow and Wurzburg. Everything so far has gone smoothly, except for our little friend Kathy at JF Properties who let us know the booking for our "La Terrasse du Marais" apartment in Paris "was secured" and she would "send the paperwork through shortly". We spent weeks trying to find an apartment in Paris scouring through dozens of websites every night with little success. We wanted to stay in a similar area in Marais to where we had stayed last time. It was difficult to find exactly what we wanted, so in the end we gave up and thought we'd send our little friend Kathy an email to ask if the apartment we'd stayed in last time was available. It was, so we said we would like to book it. She replied to let us know she had booked the dates in and those dates were secured and she would send us the paperwork shortly. Now, we've dealt with Kathy before and she wasn't the most competent of people we've ever dealt with. We were always the ones following up on her to get contracts or info because she'd take weeks getting back to us so it didn't phase us that 2 months had gone by and still no paperwork. While booking for the last of our accommodation in Inverness I remembered I still hadn't heard from our little friend. I thought before I email her to check the status of the paperwork I'll just check the reservations page on her website. There it was, dates booked at the start of our stay and dates booked at the end of our stay with 3 days available in between. "KATHHHHYYYYY". A quick email confirmed the worst. She had not secured the dates and booked people on our dates either side of us. We knew she was useless but this was a new level of incompetence. We were now back on the hunt for accommodation in Paris with a 2 month layoff, meaning there would be fewer apartments available. We scoured the sites again non stop for two days and it seemed by the look of what was available this was going to cost us about $100 a night more. Finally, out of nowhere pops up this great little apartment in a great location for the same price as what we had.......or thought we had. So we booked the apartment and are now back on track. In the next couple of months I will start organising train tickets. With all the experience gained from the last holiday this should be a fairly simple process.........