We made it!

Well we got to Washington in time to go to grandson Brett’s graduation.  The trip out was, in some ways, almost as irritation as was the procurement of the tickets, but in this case, there was no question who was to blame for the problems, it was little me all the way.

We had tickets for a flight that was to leave from Savannah at 6:30 A.M.  Savannah is about an hour away, so we made plans to leave home at 4:30, arrive in Savannah at 5:30 and  fly away at 6:30.  (That is pretty safe in Savannah because the early morning lines are not too long in Security)  We were pushing it a little bit because we made arrangements for son Stuart to ride with us and bring the car home to avoid expensive parking, and I foolishly agreed to pick him up at his house which added fifteen minutes to the trip.  I checked in for the flight in the evening and printed up our boarding passes and tried to do stuff in the organized way.

The problem came when I arose just before four and Old Phart (me) just couldn’t get his  neuropathic feet functioning, the bags out to the car etc. in the half hour allotted. (I should have planned to get up an hour sooner). By the time we got Stuart picked up we were way behind schedule, and in spite of breaking numerous traffic laws we didn’t get to the baggage counter until after six.  The plane was already loading (and of course I had mislaid my boarding passes). We could probably have made it if we had limited ourselves to carry on luggage, but we had bags to check and the lady at the counter pointed out that they couldn’t possibly get X rayed and on the plane in time. 

We ended up paying the penalty (fifty bucks a ticket) and getting our tickets transferred to a 1:00 o’clock P.M. flight.  All we had to do was to kill 12 hours waiting for departure.  I will have to say that the people from Delta were very helpful and shepherded this situation in a way that gave us a lot of reassurance.  They were exceptionally helpful.

Stuart had “dropped us” and departed, but I called him (cell phones are very helpful) back and we went to breakfast at a Cracker Barrel and killed time with company.   

I thought our troubles were over until we got in the security line and were held up because Janet had a “snow globe” in her carry on that was a present for one of our grandchildren.  The man told me I could take it down to the Post Office in the basement and mail it Priority mail, so I rushed away to do that, and at his suggestion took my baggage claims over to the lost baggage counter and they managed to get her suitcase down before it was loaded and I inserted the snow globe, so that it could travel legally to Washington.

The flight itself was Okay.  We had a short jaunt to Atlanta, a transfer in Atlanta and a through flight to Portland (our destination).  The planes were crowded and we didn’t get as good seats as were on my lost boarding passes, but we arrived, only about seven hours later than we had expected.    With all the complaining I did about the ticket acquisition, I have to say that the flight process was made as pleasant as possible by really helpful airport personnel both in Savannah and Atlanta.  The problems we had were strictly my doing.  (As Janet has kindly reminded me several times.