Day 1 – From Des Moines, IA. To Beijing, China… Hopefully!
I (Ted) woke up around 2:30a.m., much like yesterday morning. I believe it’s probably the result of a rather volatile cocktail of nerves, excitement, anxiety and disgust (with having to use airlines) seasoned with a dash of reluctance of flying (I’ve never flown prior to today) and a heavy dose of wanting to get Caleb.
We got out of the house around 5:30a.m. and were at the airport by 6. We made it through baggage check in and security without incident.
Our flight to Chicago was supposed to board at 8:16 but due to high winds in Chi-Town, we’ve been delayed (at the time I’m writing this) by 1.5 hours… Ugh. This will either make our time in Chicago very short or veeeeerrrrrrrrry long, as in probably delayed by a full day… double ugh.
Robby has spent his time reading, going to the bathroom (high rotation!), talking, playing Tetris, walking thru the entire airport backwards and complaining (just a little) about the wait.
10a.m. – Our flight to Chicago has been delayed to the point that we’ll miss our connecting flight out of O’Hare to Beijing. Triple and final Ugh! Our options were to fly into O’Hare whenever our original flight would go and we would have to stay overnight and catch the Beijing flight the next day or we could fly to Denver on standby, arriving around 4:30, and then go from Denver to Los Angeles, arriving around 7p.m. and also on standby, and catch the LAX to Beijing flight at 12:40am on Nov. 30th, my brides birthday! That is the option that we chose. It’s almost as if we’re being mocked by the airlines for my general disgust of their industry.
I keep looking at the clocks on the bottom of the tv screens and much to my dismay, roughly 3 minutes passes between each glance.
Times like this, you can’t help but do some people watching. Blue collar, white collar, no collar, babies all the way up to 80+ year olds crooked with age. It seems that most people are more wired than most 3rd world countries. Once they announced that our flight was delayed, people were whipping out all kinds of devices to call/text/skype/blog/conference/etc God knows who.
It’s now 11:03 and we’re sitting at a completely empty gate since the original flight to Chicago just boarded. Only 6 more hours to go at the Des Moines airport!! Robby’s starting to get a little sassy…
12:10 – Our original flight to Chicago has FINALLY taken off! Instead of flying, we’re headed to the Capital City Brewpub for some lunch. Robby had chicken fingers and French fries that seemed to whip the sass right out of him. He’s a happy boy now!! He’s currently doing some homework under the watchful eye of momma.
It’s now looking like we might get on the earlier flight to Denver, although that flight has also been delayed. This industry has no shame…
2:26pm – There are currently 13 vacancies on the Denver flight so we are on standby. We need to leave soon because I’m getting sick n’ tired of hearing about men who apparently can’t/couldn’t control themselves. Herman Cain, the Norwegian dude who blew up the embassy and then shot up the kids camp, Sandusky at Penn State, some other guy at another University, Conrad Murray, John Wayne Gacy and so on… Good grief, I have a 6 year old asking some odd questions.
2:33pm – The humor that we are stuck in our home town is NOT lost on us!
This really makes me miss those letters from my brother when I lived on the East Coast. If only you had known you could have driven to Chicago or Denver in that time to catch those flights...
ReplyDeleteJust remember, Ted, that industry is making it possible for you to get that little family of four together and safely back to Iowa.
Keep the blog posts coming!