Our bags are packed, we're ready to go...

Day 1

The date is June 29th, a Sunday. Clint and I wake up at a grueling 3:45 a.m. We shower, grab our bags and leave the house at 4:40 a.m. We drive and drive, and eventually we reach our destination: Sea-Tac Airport! We're embarking on our first (together) New Hampshire trip to visit Grandma Marilyn!

Our flight from Seattle into Minneapolis/St. Paul is on time. Exhausted from seasonal allergies and a cold that just came on this morning, I sleep the whole way there. Our flights are planned perfectly; just enough layover to get from one gate to the other. We board our Manchester-bound plane in perfect time! New Hampshire is now only hours away! Or, so we thought.

After several minutes of sitting on board the plane, out Pilot announces that, due to a severs stretch of thunderstorms all across the East Coast, our flight has been delayed 40 minutes. Now the end of the world, we stay on the plane and wait out the time. Not ten minutes later the Pilot comes back on the PA and announces that all Eastbound flights have been cancelled. Awesome.

Clint, being the awesome guy that he is, immediately gets on the horn with the Northwest Airlines reservations rep and gets us booked on a flight two hours later flying into Boston. Alright, not bad! Still on our way, set back only a couple of hours! This will put us at the cottage at roughly 9:30 p.m.

Well, as you can probably imagine, things didn;t go exactly as planned. We arrive in Boston and head to the baggage claim area. We are hoping to get our bage ASAP to catch the bus to take us into Portsmouth where Grandma can pick us up. The carousel starts turning, and bags are appearing. More and more bags, and then slowly, the feeder tapers off and the same few bags keep going around the carousel, none of which belong to us. Of course, our bags didn't make it to Boston despite our request both with the Northwest reservarions rep. and the rep. at the airport tat we talked to. So once again, we go to Customer Service for Northwest and report our missing bags, which takes enough time that we miss our bus to Portsmouth, the next bus coming in little less than an hour.

As you can probably imagine, in my tired, sick, and exhausted state, I did not bear the situation well, and I lost it at the airport. I couldn't keep my tears choked back and I just had to let loose. Clint consoles me and reminds me that nothing that has happened is life threatening, and that, in fact, despite the troubles, things turned out pretty well. My tears subside for the time being, and together we sit and wait for the next bus to take us to Portsmouth...