Giving Up

This story thing was fun for a while, but turns out it takes a REALLY long time to include all of the details necessary to make for an interesting story, and as a result, I’ve written nothing. So, I give up on the whole interesting narrative thing and all y’all will just have to deal with this.

We’ll go over the first day kinda quick. The short of it is: stayed up until 4:40AM cleaning the house. And guess what? IT ACTUALLY GOT CLEAN! Not just like organized clean, but like every random thing that was sitting on the counters and tables found a home! (Okay, so I didn’t get to my office, but that’s not really part of the house, right?) I didn’t get to the vacuuming, but Rich is really good at that, so I figured that wasn’t the end of the world.

The limo arrived at my parents’ house at 5AM. So, not knowing when Rich would return from his jaunt in Winthrop but certain that it wouldn’t be before the kids expected breakfast, I fed the kids, kissed them goodbye, and drove over to my parents’. The limo arrived shortly after, and we all piled in. The next 10 minutes were spent not in transit, but in watching Dad try to coach the limo driver out of our convoluted driveway. The driver did an exceptional job, and soon enough we were on the road to the airport.

I was TIRED. And for me, tired is bad because it means that cranky is soon to follow. But, I managed to wait patiently while the airline desk person spent a full 22 minutes checking us in. I also managed to wait somewhat patiently through the obscenely long airport security line, with only minimal loud bitching about how the terrorists have won. I even managed to stumble my way to purchase a quick breakfast to bring on the plane.

But then, when I sat down on the small, four-seat-wide commuter plane, it was all over. The first flight, from Seattle to Salt Lake City, was about an hour and a half, and I had the most glorious airplane sleep (assuming that such sleep can even reach a level appropriate to be dubbed “glorious”) the entire way. The crankiness subsided, but didin’t dissipate completely.

I confess, I don’t recall much about the Salt Lake airport, or switching planes. I do recall admiring the surrounding mountains, and being surprised that one could see so many from the airport. The boarding gate itself is a complete blank, and my next memory begins as I was halfway down the aisle, wondering at the relative largeness of the six-seat-wide liner we were boarding. There was some confusion about our seats, but in the end we all sat six across in the same row, with me, Mom, and Dad on one side of the aisle, and Danielle, Debbie, and Andrew on the other.

The screens came down as the plane was taking off. At first, they simply showed the airplane’s location and direction on a map for about 10 seconds, alternating with a five-or-so second slide that showed the flight number, estimated remaining flight time, and estimated time of arrival. “I like the airplane show,” I told my mom, but I don’t think she heard. Hm, looks as though we were scheduled to land a few minutes early. Time to get back to napping.

When I woke up again, we only had about 40 minutes left in the flight. My family was all filling out customs forms. I joined the party, and after a number of cross-offs and requesting a new form once, (reading directions is not my forte when I’ve just woken up,) the form was complete, and I wrestled between sleep and awake, knowing neither which I preferred nor which I could manage for the remainder of the flight. In the end, both won.

The plane sat on the runway for a while after landing, and the pilot, (who made a point of pronouncing the “Ls” in “Vallarta”,) explained that there was another plane in our place. We waited for about 10 minutes, and finally pulled into the parking spot. There was no gangway – only two busses waiting to take us to yet another destination, one waiting at each door. We exited out the back, boarded the bus, and joined droves of other Americans waiting in the long Customs line.

By this time, I had to use the restroom relatively badly. So, I sneaked out of line and found the WC. I carefully hung my backpack – which has a separate padded pocket for the laptop – on the hook on the door, admiring the marble floor.

BAM!

The backpack had slid off the hook, and hit the marble floor – hard. A loud crack had accompanied the landing, and I hoped desperately that it was simply the computer landing on the water bottle, or one of the plastic clips on the pack hitting the floor just right. I was terrified to check my computer, and too grumpy to deal with it if anything was wrong anyway, so I happily picked up my backpack, washed my hands, and trotted off to join my family in line.

Much to my chagrin, they had made little to no progress. In fact, I wasn’t even sure if any of the ten or so lines were open.