Making Lemonade

When life gives you lemons...

I had plans to take the boys to Utah for a week. My sister Carrie is getting married soon (hooray!) and I wanted to spend a little time with her, and watch her try on some dresses. Another sister, Connie, had been visiting us over Christmas and the original plan was that I'd go back at the same time with her and she would be able to help me with Ben & Zach on the flights. As nice as flight benefits can be, they can also be very tricky. After checking flight loads it didn't look promising that we'd make it onto the same flights as Connie. Lucky for us, Darius was able to take some time off from work and come along. We left a day before Connie, on New Year's Eve and watched a beautiful full/blue moon from the window of the plane. We celebrated the new year at a hotel near the SeaTac airport in WA.

Finally a refrigerator he can play in!

Can't you just imagine Ben's scream?

On New Year's Day we planned to fly to Boise, connect to Idaho Falls, and then drive to Utah. Unfortunately our plans didn't work out the way we had hoped. The flight to Boise had gone from twenty open seats to no open seats and we didn't make the flight. We checked flight loads for the rest of the day and following days, but there was clearly no way for us to get where we wanted to go any time soon. To make things worse we had already checked our bags through to Idaho Falls, so we were left with just what was in our backpacks. I thought for sure we'd have our bags back by later in the day....not so lucky! The flights coming back to Seattle from Idaho Falls were overbooked and passengers and bags were bumped from flights. It was nearly two full days before our bags finally came in.

Okay, so we finally got our bags back and in the interim we were trying to make the best out of our situation. We had a nice place to stay near the airport and there were trains and shuttles to get us to other places. We spent one afternoon piddling around downtown Seattle and killed more time at a gigantic mall that was near our hotel. After our bags finally arrived we were ready to cut our loses and go home. Again, we weren't so lucky. There must be at least a dozen or more flights leaving Seattle everyday for Anchorage, but there wasn't one single flight we could get on the following day, so we spent a fourth night in SeaTac.

Today we're finally going home. We're currently enjoying a very long layover in the Anchorage airport and have another five hours or so to kill before we board our flight back to Cordova. Personally, I'm glad for the break. Let's just say our flight this morning was a little hellish. Ben has a piercing scream, much like an amplified bald eagle screech, and was doing his best to damage mine and our fellow passengers' eardrums. Zach was doing his part to annoy the passenger in front of him too, by kicking the tray table while he was trying to sleep. What can you do? At least it's almost over and our next flight is only a short thirty minutes. I'm very disappointed we didn't make it to Utah (sorry again Carrie!), but we'll be glad to get home.

I won't look at our attempted trip as a failure or bad omen for 2010. One of my resolutions for this year was to keep the big picture in mind...be grateful for the good I have in my life and do my best to get through the bad gracefully. The past few days have been good practice for me!

Happy New Year!