Last Saturday: travel

Today we left for our cruise.  The flight wasn't until the evening, which gave us plenty of time during the day...for better or worse.

Ben and I got our rapid COVID tests done; they both quickly came back negative.  Phew.  One less thing to worry about.

The rest of the day we finished packing, enjoyed crazy children, and pretended not to be too anxious. 

Isaac gave Ben a tiny, folded up note that said "open on plane".  To be fair, it was hard to read.  So Ben starts asking...what plane?  Flat, parallel to the floor?  Perpendicular?  At that point I took the note (because I had the pockets at the time) and said something like, "I'll carry it until we're there."  Ben quickly realized his error, but I thought it was hilarious.  We finally dropped the kids of at Larry and Cheryl's and headed to the airport.

Of course, our plane was late.  They did a terrible job of updating the status, since at 7pm we still hadn't boarded but the status board said we were leaving at 7pm.  We had an hour and a half layover in Chicago, and weren't sure we were going to make it...and a lot of people were in the same boat.  Anyway, we finally get to Chicago, taxi forever, and join about half the plane in running for our connections.  As we were deplanning we had 3 minutes before boarding was supposed to end at our connection.  We had to do a U from concourse C to B and it turns out I'm terrible at running.  I'll blame it on the backpack.  I ran almost all the way to the bottom of the U and had to stop...but was at least able to keep fast walking.  After we did the bottom of the U I took all the luggage and Ben ran the last leg to try and hold the plane.  It worked, although they might have held it even if we were a minute slower as once we were on the plane I saw a text that said they were holding it for us.  (There was at least one other couple also going to Seattle.  I think they did the same thing we did and split up.)

In exciting news, our luggage made it on too!  It got to take a shortcut.  I'm often surprised at how fast luggage goes from plane to plane.  We were able to see that it was on the plane right after sitting down thanks to technology, so it was nice to have that worry removed right away.

The rest of the trip was rather uneventful and we ended up at our hotel just fine.