After a crazy work week and an extra day of work on Saturday, I was not at all looking forward to packing late at night and then getting up at 5:30am to head to the airport BUT when you are headed to Puerto Rico during the most insanely cold and snowy winter of the past decade, it seems like a small sacrifice to make. Getting up at 5:30am is somewhat hard for a non morning person (ein Morgenmuffel as they’d say in German) like myself but then again it is almost better than 7 or 8 am because at 5:30am I don’t really feel like I’ve been fully asleep yet – ha!
Anyhow, I promptly got up and headed to my disaster of a snowblower. Only having lived in my current house since September, I was a bit worried that I might make permanent enemies with the neighbors for busing out the snowblower at quarter 6 on a Sunday morning but the 4 inches on my driveway were definitely enough to cause issues getting out of the driveway so what are ya gonna do? Let’s see where was I? Ahh yes, so before I could get on with starting the most tempermental piece of machinery I’ve ever known- that is my snowblower, I had to get through the worst ever invention of a gas can that I wish I had never bought. Do you know the ones where you have to twist and pull in order for the gas to even come through the nozzle and then as if that weren’t hard enough to manage the damn thing leeks all over the place no matter how tight I twist the cap on. Seriously? And I presume this invention was supposed prevent spillage? My magical powers of careful pouring have never failed me like this piece of #@*$ invention. Now, getting back to the snowblower that requires a gentle priming and then 10 minute relaxation period before choking and starting or else it will literally blow out parts of the engine (I know because it happened twice before I learned this delicate procedure).
Ok, this has been a major digression in my travel blog as I haven’t even left my house yet, but I just had to share. Needless to say we left the house for the airport about a half an hour later than we should have. We did our best to carefully drive fast on the not so perfectly plowed and salted roads but when we arrived at the airport the line just to drop off baggage (of course we had already checked in online the night before) was like a mile long. My fiance, who is admittedly a bit bolder than myself, immediately asked the next person in line if we could cut. I mean, I probably would’ve picked out person 9-10 but this is why I picked her as a partner, no? She went for the best solution without hesitation. We got lucky and this couple let us cut. After that we were posed with the dilemma that my fiance was TSA pre approved and I was not. With another stroke of luck I got to go through the pre-approved line since we were traveling together. We managed to bypass the huge security line in record time.
After riding the shoulders of my fiance’s great work it was now my turn. I was given the go ahead (yes this has happened before) to then run to the gate so we didn’t lose our seats. Nothing like a marathon run first thing in the morning when you aren’t wearing a bra (so not comfortable on a plane!) I made it with some time to spare so that turned out to be a touch unnecessary but at least we were on the flight.
Once we were on the plane I started to get comfortable and into my “travel routine” if you will. It consists of going to sleep as fast as I possibly can and staying asleep for as long as possible. Sometimes I can manage to not even have to be conscious for take off and landing – what I deem a truly successful travel experience. So I fall asleep for what doesn’t feel like long and realize we haven’t moved yet. The captain comes on the speaker “We are de-icing the plane. Thank you for your patience.” Ok..back to sleep. A few minutes later “We have a mechanical issue and will have to return to the gate.” It is now an hour after our original take off time. Clearly we are not going to make our connection from Atlanta to Puerto Rico. We get off the plane and convince, yes convince the air line agent to put us on standby for a flight that goes out a few hours later even though it was already overbooked. We get lucky again and get on the flight. Pfew… now we have a few hours to spare before we go through the stressful process of getting all ready and then waiting at the gate to see if you will be allowed on the plane. We did, in fact, get lucky again. I will never know if it was my Skymiles that had us as such high priority on the standby list or my fiance who managed to obliviously sneak to the front of every line when we had to rebook flights, but I do know that we make a great team regardless. And this team will be arriving Puerto Rico tonight after all!
No selfies in the airport but stay tuned for pics once we arrive!