July 12th, 2022... currently sitting in the Minneapolis / St. Paul International airport alone with all of luggage while Mama Chaos took the critters to B-Dubs to do some grazing. I figured that I'd use some alone time to do some writing. It is 4:05pm CST and our flight takes off at 6pm.
We got up around 6:30am to get prettied up, finish packing too much crap, water the garden one last time before my neighbor takes over and other various and sundry stuffs. Once the car was loaded, I had EVERYONE come out and verify that their bags were included after last years fiasco.
We left the house at 9:20am and after a quick stop at Scooters for some coffee and a smoothie, we were on the road! After two stops, we arrived at Mama's cousins house where our vehicle will remain for the next many days. We chatted for a while before our Uber arrived. He was a fine fellow named Jamal, and did a fine job getting us to exactly where we needed to be.
While we are on the way to the 50th state for all of us, we don't fly very often and when the Schmitz Mobile Chaos Unit gets into an airport, that fact becomes blatantly obvious!
Going thru the TSA check was my first of what will likely be many screw-ups. The good lady is checking our passports and Caleb still had on his mirrored sunglasses (got to look good for the ladies!). The lady asked him to remove them and he didn't hear her. She repeated it and both Mama & Rob said, "Remove the sunglasses!". And like Caleb and I do at home about 10 times a day, I said, "Geez, Ya terrorist!". Whoops!! Like I said, we call each other that at home ALL OF THE TIME, but home we are not! Luckily she either didn't understand what I said or flat out didn't hear it, or I suspect that we still might be there... whew.
Now, we sit and wait. This is where that first paragraph comes into play.
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| Loading our tiny, tiny bags of sun chips!! |
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| Caleb, like myself, likes looking out the window at the planes taking off and landing, as well as keeping a keen eye on what is happening with our own bird! |
Currently, it is nearly 11pm CST and we're about 45 minutes from landing in Fairbanks. Our flight was about 10 - 11 minutes late taking off and they had oversold the flight by roughly 13 people. How does this happen? I have zero ideas, but they announced that they were offering people $1000 cash, plus free hotel and meals to delay their flight by 24 hours. Not many takers at first but they went to $1100 pretty quickly, and eventually up to $1500. We decided that if they got to $2000, we'd take the deal. When they were at $1500, our section was called to board so no decision was to be made.
The outside temp is -72 degrees and we're traveling at 505mph. It's 8:03pm in Fairbanks currently and it bright up here in the clouds as if it were noon!
I'm excited to be out of the plane as my butt and low back are starting to hurt! However, the only part of flying that is worse than boarding the plane is disembarking the plane! But, flying is what allowed us to do this vaca so I'll tolerate it as best that I can.
After successfully getting off of our bird, we divided to conquer both the baggage claim and our rental vehicle. I took the job as official rental car securer as Mama and the varmints went to stare blankly at the baggage carousel.
I learned quite quickly that if I was the only one that showed their license that I was the only person who could legally drive this vehicle. Not a big deal unless I broke a friggin' ankle hiking or something ridiculous like that. I called Mama over so that we could have two drivers in the event of emergency as I am known for doing stupid crap.
Once I got all of the paperwork signed and handed over a weeks salary, I turned around to my peeps with our checked bag! Things are going smoothly so far! We load all of our crap into our Hyundai Santa Fe and board the vessel to embark on the journey to find our first AirBn'b.
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| This picture doesn't have much to do with anything but if you're going to photograph the lad, you've got to sneak them in sometimes! |
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| Our vessel for the next several days. More on this thing later! |
Turns out that it wasn't very hard to find and therefore wasn't much of a journey either, which is fine!
We pick our rooms and get stuff situated. Rob is feeling super bad and the descent of the plane had him feeling miserable! When he knew which room was his, he laid down and was OUT!! Caleb and I ran out to find some food and ended up at a grocery store for a few things and grabbed some sammy's and sushi. We had to wake Rob up when we got back and he got up to eat a bit and was back in bed in about 15 - 20 minutes with some food and meds in his belly.
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| A (bad) pic of the sun being shaded by all of the smoke in the air. The smoke had my eye's burning and sinuses jacked up. Thank goodness we woke up to rain on the first morning, I believe which took a bunch of the smoke down with it. |
Luckily, we didn't have to be anywhere until about noon so we let Rob sleep. It helped, thank God.
Day 1 is in the books...
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