I'll just start with this:
It's crazy and foolhardy enough to travel by air alone with 3 children, but add a bunch of crazy travel issues in there and boy oh boy.....
This is a long story, read if you date.
I made a rather last minute decision to join Kris in Orange County, CA for his airway class last week. Originally I had thought that I shouldn't go because we had just been on vacation the week before, but Kris actually had to be gone on weds and thurs as well for another continuing ed class, and I just didn't want to be left alone with all the work for almost a whole week, so I decided we'd just go.
Our travel plans were just fine to begin with. Kris was in Phoenix for his first class, and a lot of the flights out to John Wayne from ABQ connect through Phoenix. So I set us up so the kids and I would fly to Phoenix, meet Kris on the layover and then all go into John Wayne together, arriving at about 7:30PM. Sounds easy, right?
Well, the first sign of trouble was a text saying our first flight was delayed. The kids and I headed out to the airport on time anyway hoping that things would work themselves out. Well, nothing improved and we were told at check in that we would most definitely miss our connection. And that the only other flight from PHX to John Wayne was sold out. I wasn't going to fly standby and risk being stuck overnight with the kids in the airport, so the only other option was for us to connect to LAX from PHX at a later time. I took that option, and Kris and I planned that he would arrive earlier to Orange County, get a car and drive up to LAX to retrieve us.
Well, next up was security. Always a joy, and by myself with the kiddos is extra fun. The kids were actually amazingly good--I have to give them credit.
BUT, the guy at the security gate told me that I had to take the baby out of the pack I had her in. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. I've flown so so many times with babies, and I put them in packs on me so I DON'T have to take them out for security. Normally they just check your hands with a little wandy thing and let you go. Well this fresh new enthusiastic recruit was convinced that I needed to take the pack off, send it through security, carry the baby through the detector and then still get my hands checked. I was so furious. But I had to do it. So then there I was stuck with my kids, trying to pack everything up again and somehow strap my baby pack back on while still holding my baby and trying to keep my 3 yr old from disappearing.
It really doesn't take much to disrupt well laid plans and tip the scales towards chaos.
Here is an illustration from Max's journal showing this event.
And yes, this is how we all felt.
Next we thought the flight was leaving on time because evently nobody had changed the monitors, so they were all still showing on time. So we sprinted to the gate just to find that it was still delayed of course. More stress.
Then I took the kids to get sandwiches because I figured it was going to be a long night and it was better to start them off full--it was a good decision by the way.
While we were eating we heard some announcements overhead--of course I didn't think they applied to us, but they totally did.
The terminal in Phoenix that we were supposed to fly into and then out of was entirely closed because of a "security breach." All flights in and out of PHX were indefinitely delayed and more like canceled. And our gate had changed. (Yes, why change the gate for a canceled flight? Who knows.)
Oh great.
See my head exploding in the drawing? Well, that's pretty accurate.
I went to talk to the folks at the gate and somehow ended being the first person in line at the new gate. Right next to us there was a flight lining up to leave that went to LAX through Vegas. The lady at the gate decided she was going to get us on that flight. I had already decided we were probably out of luck, but she was convinced it was going to work. BUT there were only two seats available and we needed three. Everybody behind me in line started saying, "I'D like to get on that flight, what about ME!? I'm just ONE person." But the lady was like, "Sorry, those seats belong to these guys." She found a person on the list that was traveling with out their southwest companion, which is totally against the rules. That person got kicked off, and the kids and I got escorted onto the plane, into the very last row which the flight attendants had saved for us.
It was crazy. I never thought we were goign to get anywhere that night. Here we are. Kids were very very good. They just played games and Lucy giggled and smiled.
In the meantime though, what about Kris? He was the one that really needed to get to CA, considering he had a class at 8AM the next morning. We were just going for fun. And he was stuck at an airport that was closed.
He waited outside the terminal for a while, and finally decided it wasn't worth trying to get on a later flight or spend hundreds on a flight with another airline. So he figured he would just drive. He had to hitch a ride to the rental car place because he had his surf board with him. He got a car and started driving around 6 or 7PM.
We finally arrived in LA around maybe 9 California time. That's pretty late for the kids. Lucy was completely asleep, and Sandy was also completely asleep. So asleep that I couldn't really get him to wake up. Luckily we had made friends with some of the flight attendents and one of them carried him off the plane. Out there on the jetway he woke up just enough to refuse to ride in a wheel chair of course.
Our stroller was supposed to be waiting for us at the gate, but of course it wasn't, it was down in the baggage claim, so I had to drag Sandy by the hand all the way out there. Where, of course we found that the stroller was the only piece of luggage to have made it. All our suitcases, carseats and etc. were lost somewhere in transit--this was completely unsurprising considering they were booked on a flight through PHX which probably never happened.
But of course we had to go to the baggage office and make a claim and wait around forever for them to get all the paperwork together. They told me the luggage should arrive sometime during the night and it would be delivered to our hotel. What could I say but OK? The boys were soooo tired so we moved on.
THEN we got to go out and wait for the rental car shuttle. We probably waited for 20 min, and then waited on the shuttle for another 30 or 40 minutes while the bus drove around in heavy traffic to every other possible stop that could ever have been imagined and picked up tens of hundreds of people until the shuttle felt like some sort of 3rd world country bus with chickens and people hanging off the top.
There we are!
We got the last minivan on the lot and once I got the horribly cheap and yucky loaner carseats that Southwest had given us installed we loaded the kids in and started driving down to Laguna Hills where our hotel rooms were awaiting us.
There were actually no tears from anybody until this point. It was about 10:30PM in CA, 11:30 to the kiddos and there we were in uncomfortable carseats on the 5. Lucy was NOT feeling it. She cried all the way to the hotel. But nobody else cried the whole night, and that was her first crying fit. It was actually totally miraculous.
We got into the hotel and of course they first tried to tell me that our rooms weren't connecting, which I had called TWICE to confirm (the front desk guy was wrong--they did connect) and then when we got to the room the baby crib that I had called to request ahead of time was missing and nobody working knew where it was. So Lucy had to sleep with me. I got everybody to bed and Kris arrived about 30 minutes later.
The luggage didn't get to us until Saturday morning. But it did arrive and all in one piece.
It's the craziest travel experience I've ever had, and my kids were amazing. Thinking back on it I honestly can't believe how good they were. It was a blessing because if they had been tough on top of everything else my head might've truly blown up.
