Before I explain the title of this post, I want to ask your patience as I am in the process of making some changes to our blog that will hopefully allow me some more creativity in my posts. You will likely see the blog change color and design and the formatting with simply look funny as I try to figure this all out. Hopefully it won’t take too long, but bear with me as I go through the learning process again.
Anyway…we just got home from Florida. Every year it seems to get harder for me to come home. Granted, I have never liked the cold and snow, I don’t like to be cold, I don’t like the snow for more than a day, it really begs the question as to why I live in a place where it snows, the answer is simple, that is where my husband lives. :) This year was no exception, I did not want to leave Florida. We left Saturday around 5pm for the airport to come back to Illinois. Now, should you know us at all, you know that we have had all sorts of adventure’s during our years of plane travel, including Midway Mayhem, They Were Not Bored (Mexico), Key West Drama, and lots of running. Combine this with my brother Brett’s less than stellar track record with plane travel and then add yesterday to the mix and you will see why this morning Brett and I looked at each other saying, “Votes for Driving to Florida next year?” But, I digress, back to the current story. We got the airport and got checked in quickly and made it through security with no problems. We had one hour to putter around before boarding began for our flight to Atlanta. The plane came in on time, but for some reason it took a really long time to unload the previous passengers and we ended up leaving Fort Lauderdale about 10 minutes late. We landed in Atlanta airport at 9:25pm, with 30 minutes to make it through the airport before our next flight was to take off. It turned out that we came in at gate D4 and our next flight left from gate C8. For those of you unfamiliar with Atlanta airport, those two gates are pretty far apart. :) So, we took off across the airport to get to the train that would take us to concourse C. MANY MANY thanks to Brett who graciously took Lincoln from me and carried him! Mike had to take the elevator since we had our double stroller with us, so that added some time to our travel. At about 9:42 as we are speed walking through the airport we hear “Attention in the terminal. Will the Kaiser and Rassi parties please report immediately to Gate C8.” Hmmm…it’s never a good sign when they are paging you. :) So, we started running the rest of the way and told the airport worker that the rest of our party (did I mention we had my grandparents with us too) were coming shortly. So, we made it on the plane. Hooray!
We thought all was well, we were going to have survived one of our few round trip flying experiences with no major story to tell. Well around 10:30pm the co-pilot reported that we had begun our descent into Bloomington. A few minutes later, he said that he had bad news and due to incredibly low visibility in Bloomington, they were not able to get clearance to land there and we were being diverted to Moline. At this point, I’m thinking, “Seriously….Moline. We have no car, no coats, no carseats and if I can’t be in Florida, I certainly do not want to be in Moline.” But my hat goes off to all my travel companions who never uttered one word of complaint and were cheerful the whole time. We landed in Moline and they told us they had buses waiting to take us to Bloomington. So at 12am we left Moline via bus, headed back to Bloomington. At 2:15am, we arrived back to the airport where we found our car and headed home. While slightly more stressful than I would have liked, I was so thankful to have Grandpa and Grandma and Brett and Tessa along. They each helped us so much by carrying kids, keeping the mood light, carrying bags, giving up their coats to keep the kids warm…THANK YOU!
When we landed in Moline, Grandma overheard a woman say, “At least we aren’t in Haiti.” To which we all heartedly agreed.
While it seems to all have ended as well as it possibly could have, we find ourselves still considering today, to fly or not to fly, that is the question. :)
Stay tuned for pictures from our trip.
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