We got back on Sunday...and boy do I have some stories.
For starters, I got back into my workout routine yesterday afternoon. So, that's a positive. The bulk of the last 4 days was more than my nerves really could handle.
Friday - Everything seemed normal at the start. We were flying Southwest, I'd done online check in the day before right at the 24 hour mark and got decent boarding groups. Hilton also sent me a 24 hour check in notice with arrival time and digital key options, so I was good there. I even got a reminder on my rental car. I was in a positive place. Everything in the Houston airport went like a breeze. I was still feeling good as we were getting ready to land for our connection in Chicago. We had a beautiful view of downtown and the lake... and that's when things took a turn.
- I couldn't get things to connect on our first flight, but as soon as we landed, I had a text from a boss about some work stuff that threw me into a panic. I texted back, but never heard back, which weighed on my mind all weekend.
- We had a 4 hour layover and were approaching things casually when I started getting alerts from Southwest about a pending winter storm. I knew about the one that was going to be hitting the gulf coast, but I was blissfully unaware of approaching Winter Storm Demi. The alerts were advising me to cancel or rebook our return flights to avoid storm related delays and strandings.
- The first time I rebooked, they booked us onto a much earlier flight going through BWI. I felt good for about 20-30 minutes until I realized that BWI was also an airport under this warning. So, I called back again and they rebooked us through Orlando. So, return was now Hartford to Orlando to Houston. At least we'd below any freezing precip.
- We sat down at a place in the terminal for dinner just to be informed Sam couldn't be there because they considered it a bar and she was under 21. It was one of a handful of places that looked like this and they were all serving food, but nope. So, now we had to hunt a place that would let her sit...it took a bit.
- In the middle of this, we found out our flight to Hartford was delayed by about 30 minutes. It wound up only being delayed 10-15, but we were already landing after 10pm and were looking at a late night with a really early morning.
- Bradley is supposed to be an easy airport and getting from the gate to baggage wasn't bad, but the rental car area was so odd and not well labeled. We walked to the end of the terminal, outside, up a ramp towards a parking area, across several driveways, and through a maze of other places finally to come back inside to more twisting and turning. Once there, their card reader wouldn't read my credit card. Thankfully I had a backup that worked, but it's now after 11pm, I've been on the go since 9am and I was in no mood.
- Getting to the hotel wasn't awful, but parking was pretty limited at the late hour and while the room was decent, the bedding was not. The blankets were flimsy and even when using all four pillows they squished so much that it was like having 1.5.
Saturday- This was a relatively good day.
- We'd lost an hour flying east, so we were quite tired, but we were there and made it down to the hotel breakfast. Sam was hoping to sleep in a bit more but they decided to open up camp registration 30 minutes early because basketball was also being played that day and they wanted to get people in place. So, needless to say, we were grumpy.
- As we were driving to the campus, I noticed the hood of the rental SUV start flapping around. Thankfully, it did not fly up while I was driving but it turns out that it had come unlatched! I managed to get it secured and it was good for the rest of the trip, but it's pretty scary to have that happen on a highway...especially in an unfamiliar area.
- I was hoping to go walk the campus during the camp and maybe find Sam some decent lunch, but it was cold and rainy and nothing in walking distance was really her thing. So, I went to a local supermarket after she checked in, lost my good parking spot (which was good for getting in some extra steps), and spent the day milling around a cold covered football field area that they were using for the camp.
- Around 3:45pm, I wave of horror came over me. In all of the panic and flight rebooking from the day before, I forgot to reset my Southwest check in reminder. If you're not on it exactly at the 24 hour mark, you are assured of being one of the last ones on the plane. I checked in, but got C35-C36 for flight one and C34-C35 for flight two. Not good. I had the option of buying our way into group A but that was an extra $220. We'd make it work.
- Overall, the camp was OK, but there were some things towards the end that we didn't like. It was at least interesting to talk to some of these people and be around people from places where I grew up. Still, I never like leaving a camp wondering if the money could have been spent better.
- With the rain and gloom, it got dark really early. There were also still crowds from basketball, so we decided to skip checking out the campus and headed back to the hotel. We were originally booked to fly out around 5pm on Sunday and had all kinds of plans to drive and explore both Saturday night and Sunday morning, but everything to our north and west was ice and snow. So we decided to skip exploration. Although, we did have a great dinner at an area diner.
Sunday- This is when things go totally off the wall.
- We had a 7;40am flight and I'm one of those that likes to be there 2 hours early at the very least. The airport was only about 25 minutes away but all of that rain from the day before had frozen to ice on the roads. I figured the highways would be fine, but not the town or parking lot. So we left early and I drove ever so carefully and SLOWLY through the icy lot and local town roads.
- When we got to the rental car return, a Jeep in front of me parked in the middle of the lane blocking everything off. Nobody was there from the rental car company. People started pulling in behind me, so now we were blocked in. Finally some guy came out...totally frantic. We helped him clear cones to open up a new lane. I left Sam with the bags off to the side (because we had been in the process of just leaving it where we were before he came running up). She accidentally left her door semi-open, but I just drove with it to the line the guy wanted us to form. I got out, went around the other side to try opening and re-shutting the door when PARK disengaged and the vehicle started rolling. The woman in front of me was screaming. I managed to use my body to stop the vehicle by bracing myself up against the door frame. I started screaming at the worker to help. It took him a minute but he ran over and engaged the emergency brake.
- We had to go through that same silly winding mess to get back to the terminal and when we did, I was so flustered that I accidentally had mistaken the JetBlue kiosks for Southwest. I started to panic when it couldn't find our reservations. All was good once I realized my error, but just unnerving.
- Security was also a mess. A lot of people flying with wheelchairs and poor line management. What should have been no more than 10 minutes took nearly 30 since they decided separating me and Sam to make way for all of these wheelchairs that showed up after us.
- It's always cute being on flights into Orlando because there are tons of little kids excited to go to Disney. This was no exception. Sam and I even found decently placed aisle seats one row apart, so group C wasn't too bad. What was bad was my belt got twisted and we couldn't disengage the aisle armrest to fix things to buckle me. Even the stranger across the aisle was trying to help, which was kind and awkward all at once. We were all too packed in to readjust and they wanted to shut the cabin door, so I was given a belt extender to make it work. It was embarrassing, but I was secured.
- This flight to Orlando ranks as one of my top 3 most turbulent flights that I can remember. The pilot actually told us that the first half would be fine but made an oddly sarcastic implication that the second half wasn't just going to be turbulent, but well...he left it as "well." It was awful. I was in tears several times. The only saving grace was that movies, tv, Facebook and text were all working.
- After we landed in Orlando, I was so rattled that I joked to Sam about leaving and going to WDW. I even got a message from Life360 that saw my location and asked if I wanted it to book a Lyft or Uber. That's around when I saw that we were already delayed into Houston. I couldn't figure out why, but it was already about 45 off. Then we went under severe t-storm warning. They had a brief ground stop and whatever was going on outside was bad enough that most of the main lights went out in the terminal. What's sad...if we'd flown through BWI, even with the snow, we would have already been in the air on our final leg into Houston.
- In the middle of this, I get a text from David asking about the heat at home and our thermostat. I asked him if it said heat...he of course hadn't put on his glasses. Still, when he checked, it was set on 70 but only 64 inside the house. We were expecting a winter storm with several days of below freezing temps and measurable snow, so we needed this fixed pronto. I fed him a few names of reputable HVAC companies and waited for the bad news. The furnace is old and the part we'd need couldn't be ordered until Tuesday due to the holiday. There was also no guarantee they'd have it because our furnace was old and past the standard lifetime of a furnace. Option 2 was to replace the furnace, but even that would have to wait a day to get a crew and we still ran the risk of no heat in the middle of an extended freeze (remember how bad things were here in 2021?) if anything went wrong.
- Oh well, in all of my worries about the furnace, I wasn't paying attention to our delays as much. I think we were originally supposed to land in Houston around 2:45 but wound up landing right around 4pm because of the delays. The flight was also so bumpy that they couldn't have beverage service. What's funny...while it was turbulent, it wasn't nearly as bad as the flight from Hartford to Orlando.
- Our bags (while they made it) were the very last ones off. I hate when that happens. I really hate it.
- A friend lent us four of their space heaters to help for the night and next day. We were running one on a circuit where we often run a small one (theirs was even smaller) and it tripped the circuit. I couldn't figure out how to get it flipped back and it was dark and cold, so we had to reconfigure a few things and put in a call into an electrician in the morning. Thankfully, the electrician was able to help me fix it by phone and saved me the service fee (it was something fairly simple that I couldn't see in the dark), but it was one more headache.
I had plans to work out on Sunday night after getting in early, but it was so cold in the house that there was zero desire. I also never got to use the gym in the hotel, but we walked a ton in the airports on Friday and Sunday, and I put in over 3 miles of walking during the camp on Saturday...some of which was up hill. So, it wasn't a sedentary patch by any means.
As of about 4:30pm yesterday, the new furnace was in place and we have heat. We also have snow. We're just west of the areas getting the worst. It was crazy to see a blizzard warning show up for Beamont, TX to Baton Rouge, LA. It's also unnerving any time Jim Cantore from The Weather Channel shows up where you live. I know this would be nothing for northern states, but there are no snowplows (they shipped in a few, but more for the airports), stores here do not sell shovels, most people use an old credit card for an ice scraper, and unless you have hunting or ski gear...most people don't own anything warm enough for real winter. At least the dog loves it and I still have proper gear.
