So, to give you atiny break from the picture onslaught that is about to occur, I thought I would share a little about our "first day of vacation." We woke up bright and early at 4am Eastern Time to get to the airport, park, ride the shuttle in from long term parking, get checked in and check our bag in time for our 6am flight to Detroit where we would then catch our flight to SFO and land in sunny California by 11:30am Western Time. Ahhh! In anticipation of our first day I had purchased tickets to the Giant's game against the Dodgers, because I knew it would make hubs really happy and the stadium overlooks the bay, which would make me really happy (truth be told, if they serve funnel cake I can be happy anywhere).
We arrive at the airport bleary-eyed at 4am to discover that some storms the night before had knocked out the radar at the airport for several hours, delaying, grounding and preventing flights from landing. Apparently our plane that was supposed to take us to Detriot never even made it into Indy. Bummer.
I slap on my sweetest Southern charm, which really means that I was polite and patient and kind in the midst of alot of grumpy, sleepy customers and proceeded to tell the woman at the ticket counter that it was our aniversary trip and that I bought my husband baseball tickets for that night so could we please, please, please get there at a decent hour. Bless her heart, I felt so bad for telling her all this because she worked and worked and looked and looked but the best thing she could find was a 1pm Eastern Time departing Indy flying us the JFK in New York and then taking us to SFO, landing at 8pm. Sigh!
Not to let the slight delay in travel rain on our parade I talked Tim into leaving the airport, to go home and take a nap and in the spirit of vacation going to our favorite breakfast place Cafe Patachou on the way back to the airport for our next flight. Yum!
So we arrive BACK at airport to discover that our flight has some mechanical problems, they finally get us boarded, back out of the gate and have ANOTHER mechanical problem, delaying us again. So off we go to New York, on the exact opposite coast of where we want to be! Eek!
When we are somewhere over Pensylvania the pilot comes over the intercom and tells us that the same storm that messed up our first flight was currently over JFK and so they weren't recieving any flights, we were basically going to have to hang out at 35,000 feet for a while until the storms cleared.
But wait it gets better...we hang out for so long in the air that we run out of gas, so the pilot comes back over the intercom and shared that we have to fly over to Allentown, PA for gas real quick, then we can hop back up into the air and hang out and wait some more. But the pilot isn't so sure that we will get our spot back "in line" to land at JFK, we may have to kick it Kindergarten style and go to the back of the line because we had to hop out to get some gas. Sweet.
So at this point we realize that there is no way that we are going to make it to our connecting flight from JFK to SFO, which is sort of ironic because we love vacationing in NYC and it was on the list of places to go, but instead we chose San Francisco because of the cooler weather and because we travel to NYC often enough.
Anyhow, we land in JFK finally and of course we missed our connecting and our airlines put us on standby for a flight that would arrive in SFO around midnight. They also informed us that our suitcase had somehow gotten there about 6 hours ahead of us (I guess it went ahead and saw the Golden Gate Bridge and grabbed a drink without us).
Luckily we got on that flight and wearily landed in SFO a little after midnight. Too tired to use our brains, after nearly 24 hours of being up with nothing more than short naps, we grabbed a cab and got to our hotel and crashed.
Two awsome things happened in the midst of all of this. First we made friends with our flight attendant Renee, on that too long flight to JFK. We had the front seats of our little plane so as we sat circling and waiting, we faced Renee in her flight attendant's seat. She was super sweet and even e-mailed us the next day to make sure we made it to our vacation. I wish we had of asked her to take a picture of us sitting there so I would have it to capture this crazy day, but oh well!
The other awesome thing that happen is some thing I would have never expected, done or thought would ever happen to this little ol' gal from Oklahoma. I got to see both oceans in one day! I had the window seat on both flights and saw both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. I know people that fly from one coast to another regularly are probably like "no big deal, so what" but I never really traveled much besides to see family across the southwest and midwest growning up and have never really considered myself a world traveler (you have to leave the country to be that, right?) so this was really, really cool.
So the first day of our vacation wasn't what we had planned, but it was fun because we got to spend it together, meet new people and do something we had never done before.
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