There And Back Again

Hi! I have no idea what happened to that last post I wrote!

After our flight was delayed on Sunday, we did end up leaving Wednesday, but it wasn’t 8:15 Wednesday morning like they said. We got on the plane around that time, and ended up arriving in Spokane at about 1pm. I should probably mention that this is a 40 minute flight. We sat on the plane for roughly four hours while they de-iced, got delayed, de-iced again, got delayed, started to de-ice again but ran out of de-icer and had to have the truck run to get refilled, de-iced for the third time, sat around, and finally took off.

We had an action-packed three days but overall, it went really well. We saw all the grandparents and spent some time with everybody’s family and got presents and ate too much food.

Getting from Spokane to Portland was also an adventure. The weather had been kind of crap so we assumed there would be delays, but we did not expect to walk into the Spokane airport to see a line of hundreds of people stretching through the walkways up to the Southwest counter area. For some reason, their e-ticket check-in kiosks were out of order and they had THREE people total working the counters for all of their flights. It was never really explained why this was the case, but we spent about 45 minutes in line just to check in and check our bags.

Since we arrived with about an hour to spare, this meant we had 15 minutes to make it through security, over to our gate, and on the plane. Jog jog jog, security, jog jog jog to the gate to see… another line. This one wasn’t so much a “line” as it was “a big mess of people in front of the gate counter” and we couldn’t really tell where we were supposed to stand.

Two people had designated themselves the line police, so while we were asking several people if they were in line and what they were in line for, a man in the back kept yelling “PLEASE DON’T CUT” to anyone who walked by, and this batty old lady kept directing people out of her line and giving incorrect information to the people standing next to her.

We stood in this line for over an hour. No explanation was ever given for why the first line was so long, or why this second line was so long – I overheard it had something to do with an earlier flight to Portland that had been canceled, so our line was made up of the people booted off that flight plus our own delayed flight. Thing is, our flight never actually said it was delayed – we just didn’t make it on the plane for a loooong time.

Now that we’re back in Portland, Daniel is off to work and I need to clean the bathroom. I considered taking down the Christmas decorations, but… I like them, so maybe when it gets closer to January. I hope your holidays were lovely and had less travel trouble than mine did, and hopefully I find that post that disappeared.

File Under: Family, General

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