This face about sums up our trip home. It was filled with excitement, drama, speeding, time changes, tears, laughter, high blood pressure, swollen legs, Presidential angst and lots of down time. It started off great, we had a great breakfast provided by awesome cousin Kari and started the drive to Spokane Washington from Kalispel Montana to catch our flight. We were enjoying the beautiful scenery, the kids were watching some fun movies and we thought we were making good time. We thought we had it all planned out. Then we learned a painful lesson. Montana roads are NOT like California roads. No 5 lane freeways here where everyone is going over the speed limit. No sir. There were a lot of beautiful 2 laned roads that were closed down to one lane. Meaning we had to sit, sit, sit and sit and wait for the lead car to bring the cars coming the other direction. After enduring 3 of those road stops plus a lot of mountainous roads we realized that the good time we were making diminished to no time and we were going to miss our flight. Not only that but we had no cell service to let us call the airline, find our exact GPS location or give us peace of mind. When we would finally picked up one bar of service I quickly called the airline only to learn that there were only 4 tickets available on the later flight. The next flight out wasn't until the next morning. I was freaked out to split the family in case something happened so we decided to just drive as fast as we could and pray a lot. Trav dropped us off at the airport and I had to handle 5 kids, tons of luggage and check in without him while he raced to drop off the rental car and pay the enormous gas charge fee since we didn't have time to put gas in the car. I am pregnant and frantic hauling all the luggage in, Taylor is in tears because Trav was barking out last minute instructions and I raced to the counter telling them I am trying to make the San Diego flight which leaves in 20 minutes at 4:10 and could they please hold the flight. They looked at me like I was crazy which was expected - I was very crazy. I was also throwing luggage from one suitcase to another to try and meet the weight requirements, sweating, stressing and waiting for them to inform me that they couldn't hold the flight for 7 of us. Then Taylor walks over to me and tells me that it is not 3:50 like we thought but it was 2:50. It took a good minute for that to sink in and for me to realize that since we had crossed into Washington we had also changed into another time zone. Since we had no cell service for most of the trip we had no idea of that monumental fact. I started to cry joining Taylor just for good measure. Then Travis comes running up to us having spent almost $80 in charges to fill up the car and sees us crying only they were tears of joy. We spent the next 30 minutes apologizing to the kids and praising Taylor for being our stress reliever and discovering the time zone change. We then had a good hour to kill to laugh and admit how insane we all are. It was one of those "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times" moments. After killing our extra gained hour we learned that our plane would be delayed for another hour and a half because wonderful Joe Biden was flying in and they had to clear the air space. We finally boarded the plane 2 1/2 hours after getting to the airport and entertaining 5 children in a packed airport with no children's entertainment to be found. We had a short and uneventful trip to our layover in Vegas only to learn that our flight would be delayed another hour because our wonderful President Obama was flying in and they had to yet again clear the airspace. I swear if I weren't already a Republican I would switch after today's day. It was just one of those things that topped off our already crazy, hectic and laughable day.
Lexie summed up the day with one look.
Kaden was as sick of the day as we were
If I had a penny for every time Lexie asked how many more minutes until we were home I may have made $1K that day.
I will admit that serious bribery was involved at the airport and we probably spent more on junk food, dinner and knick-knacks than we would have spent eating out with our whole family at Ruth's Chris but at the end of the day we saved a whole day in travel by flying and we created a MAJOR family memory that we will laugh about for years.
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