Traveling Woes

Chris and I went to New York last week. We had a great time putting around doing the tourist thing with Chris’ family friend George. He was great. Took us to all sorts of neat places and out on a boat on a tour of things that most people will never see. But our trip home wasn’t so good. We were booked on an afternoon flight out of JFK on American Airlines. We were supposed to go to San Diego and then get a connecting flight on Alaska to come home.

So we kept Daphne awake the whole day until we got on the airplane so that she would take a good long nap. We figured we might make it easier that way, though she wasn’t so happy about it when we wouldn’t let her take a nap in the car on the way to the airport. Anyway, she did take a nap, but it wasn’t a very long one. So mommy and I got to do a lot of entertaining after she woke up.

Anyway, she did pretty well, but due to weather our plane was quite late getting in, and we missed our connection (the gate guy said we would have missed it even if we had been on time because the flights were booked so close together). Besides the ludicrousness of flying from NY to San Diego to get to Portland, we weren’t thrilled to find out that there weren’t any other flights that day.

So then we had to be put up in a hotel for the evening and were given $30 in airport dollars to buy dinner and breakfast. Needless to say, that bought a tiny dinner at the airport’s Pizza Hut. Then the reservation at the hotel was lost/confused so it took many phone calls to many different people to finally get that sorted out and get to the hotel room. We were able to sleep for a while and then we got up to go back to the airport to catch the first flight out. While we were waiting for the shuttle, we checked out of the hotel and there was a message from AA confirming our flight and wishing Chris a happy b-day. I was very surprised by this. We had mentioned it while fussing about our flight being missed, but it was a very nice customer service touch in the midst of the confusion/problems caused by the flight being late.

We did end up making it home. A bit late and really tired, but we’re home safe and sound. But I think it will be a while before we are taking too many more airplane flights with little children.