Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Christmas Saga: Part 1

This year's Christmas adventures will be brought to you in 4 editions! Part 1 is entitled

"Airports and Gong Shows"

We stayed a week in Kansas (it was super fun), and then were going to fly to Minnesota late in the afternoon Christmas day. It's only an hour and a half flight, and doing it this way meant we would have a more even amount of time with both our families. We just can't pick favorites yet.

Well we got to the airport and saw our flight was delayed 1/2 hour. No big deal, right? Then an hour later we find out that our flight got canceled, yes canceled, on Christmas day because there was a problem with the de-icing mechanism. Say what?! What a gong show. First of all, there were like 3 flights in the whole airport that day, why can't you just pull out another airplane? And second, the flight was canceled instead of further delayed because they had to fly a mechanic in from Minneapolis to fix it. Do they not have mechanics in Kansas City? I'm still really confused on that one...

We ended up staying the night in a hotel in Kansas City and getting free dinner there. If it hadn't been Christmas, it wouldn't have been such a bad deal. The hotel was decent enough (it was a Hilton). We also got travel vouchers to use in the future. That made me feel a little better. At least a little bit.

We caught a super early flight the next morning and were at my house in Minnesota by 9:00am. My dad, being the nostalgic that he is, put everyone's candy and treat bags back in the stockings and put them back out by the Christmas tree so we could all open them together. They saved out some of the presents for everyone there, in addition to the ones for Matthew and I. Basically we had a second Christmas morning. My dad suggested to my brothers that he would just re-wrap all of the presents they had already opened, but put different name tags on them so they would be surprised for the second Christmas morning. The thing is, with my dad, you hope he's kidding about something like that, but because it could fall under the category of "nostalgic" or "memorable" or something like that, you're just never quite sure.

Fast forward to the end of the following week: New Years Day morning when we were supposed to fly back to Utah. Well, we decided we really didn't want to go back yet, and since the nice travel lady that my mom talked to saw that we had had problems on Christmas day, she rebooked us at no extra charge for very late on New Years. Here's where the gong show really starts banging. We were thinking about going back on Monday morning, but Matthew didn't want to miss any of his classes on the first day, and not come back minutes before he had to jump right into things. So we came back Saturday. Again, no big deal. However, Monday morning, Matthew goes up to school and all his classrooms are locked and the professors aren't really around. School didn't start until Tuesday. We totally could have stayed 2 extra days.

That is why life is just a gong show sometimes. At first you're all like 'oh cool gongs!' And then after 10 minutes you're thinking 'oh my goodness make it stop!'

Not meaning to end this post on a negative note, I will say that despite some bumps, everything was fun and worked out. Stay tuned for Christmas Saga: Part 2...I'll give you a sneak preview. Part 2 involves hats that look like this:
It's going to be legendary!

1 comment:

mommykay said...

Eagerly awaiting the continuing saga.