Day 1 - Part 1

On the road again . . . 

So here we go again, off on another grand adventure. And today did not fail to provide adventure. But I am getting a little ahead of myself, let's begin at the beginning.

Tim and Michelle headed down with Zander on Monday night, arriving in LA at Tim's parents house around 11:30 pm. Their philosophy on jet lag is that if you just don't sleep the night before your flight, then adjust yourself to the time zone of where you are going and sleep according to those time periods on the plane, you can hit the ground running free from jet lag once you arrive. So true to form, we stayed awake all night and early morning packing and planning with Ed and Diana. Tim's sister Susanne arrived around 5 am for the trip to LAX to catch our 8:30 flight. And here is where all of the real fun began.

Five minutes into the drive to the airport Ed realized that he forgot his glasses at home. Thankfully it was a quick turn around to get back to the house, and a short search quickly revealed them in the bedroom. Then, we were back on the road . . . again. 

We arrived at LAX around 6:30 am and said tearful goodbyes. I give you one good guess to see who in our party of four had the "tearful" part. Tim said a few bets have been made (he won't say by whom) on how long Michelle will last before a meltdown. Yeah, it was Michelle, but you can't really count that as a meltdown, she gets at least one freebie. 
On the road again . . .

So here we go again, off on another grand adventure. And today did not fail to provide adventure. But I am getting a little ahead of myself, let's begin at the beginning.

Tim and Michelle headed down with Zander on Monday night, arriving in LA at Tim's parents house around 11:30 pm. Their philosophy on jet lag is that if you just don't sleep the night before your flight, then adjust yourself to the time zone of where you are going and sleep according to those time periods on the plane, you can hit the ground running free from jet lag once you arrive. So true to form, we stayed awake all night and early morning packing and planning with Ed and Diana. Tim's sister Susanne arrived around 5 am for the trip to LAX to catch our 8:30 flight. And here is where all of the real fun began.

Five minutes into the drive to the airport Ed realized that he forgot his glasses at home. Thankfully it was a quick turn around to get back to the house, and a short search quickly revealed them in the bedroom. Then, we were back on the road . . . again.

We arrived at LAX around 6:30 am and said tearful goodbyes. I give you one good guess to see who in our party of four had the "tearful" part. Tim said a few bets have been made (he won't say by whom) on how long Michelle will last before a meltdown. Yeah, it was Michelle, but you can't really count that as a meltdown, she gets at least one freebie. :)

We go to check into the kiosk and get our boarding passes next. Tim checks in, passport is scanned an accepted. Michelle checks in, passport is scanned and accepted. Diana goes to check in . . . and can't find her passport. It turns out that when we made copies of them for Susanne to keep in case of an emergency, we forgot to take the passport back out of the scanner. So it is at home, and our flight leaves in 90 minutes. We make a quick call to Susanne to see if she can run back to the house and back out to LAX. She tries her darnedest, but long story short, with the major increase in traffic (remember, it is now around 7:30 am on a Tuesday) she just can't get there in time. So Tim and Ed hop on the plane, and Michelle and Diana are left to wait for the passport and then work with the airline to rebook the tickets. And before all of you start giving the guys grief for leaving their wives, know that it was the wives idea and we pushed them to go. We figured it was easier and cheeper to rebook 2 people versus 4. And off they went, barely making their plane.

The nice thing was, Tim had talked to the booking agents, the TSA workers and the baggage workers about our situation, so once Michelle and Diana got in line to rebook their tickets, they had lots of friends who could commiserate with them and help them get going. Plus, the women just made the decision that they would be happy with whatever happened, and consider this a grand adventure. There was no sense being angry about it, and this was made all the more real by the number of angry people in line who took out their frustration on the ticketing agents. When they reached the front of the line they were told that there were no flights until the next day. Michelle asked her to check any flights that would get them to Rome, no matter the layover location. At the same time, they made sure to say thank you to everyone who had helped earlier in the morning. And wouldn't you know it, the ticketing agent could find us two seats on the next plane (leaving in 3 hours) and we would get to Rome 4 hours behind the guys. When asked how much the transfer cost to the new tickets, they were told it was FREE. We had just watched person after person rebooking missed flights and having to pull out credit cards. And here we were getting the change done for free, even though it was our fault that we missed the flight. The agent had mercy on us and put down that we missed our flight due to "long lines" and which came with a waived fee. Praise the Lord!

The ladies bags were checked, and they hopped on the 11:30 flight to New York. When they exited, they made their way over to terminal 1 from terminal 2, and ran right into Tim! It turns out the original flight was late in leaving, causing Ed and Tim to miss the connecting flight to Rome. So they guys were rebooked on the same flight as Diana and Michelle. Not only that, Tim managed to find out that we were rebooked and worked with the ticketing agents in NY to have us all sit together.

So ends the first part of our first day. More to come later this evening. Trust us, it keeps getting better!