We are home! Our Spring Break travel adventure has finally ended… almost 48 hours after the time we were supposed to be home, we are finally done.
It’s all fun and games until you get stuck in Charlotte without your luggage.
We had a great time in Bradenton, Florida for baseball spring training. I went to a couple of the Pirates games with Morry, Evan, and Noah, but what I would do was drop off the boys early. Then, I’d head to the beach or river for a while and come back to see the last part of the games.
We played mini-golf, ate a lot of good food, played on the beautiful white sandy beaches with turquoise water, and more.
We were supposed to get home on Thursday, the 18th. There was bad weather in both Charlotte and Dallas that apparently caused lots of issues for both airports. We knew there was going to be bad weather in Charlotte and we even got a warning from American Airlines that our flight might change. But American wouldn’t let us change our layover to a different city even though they knew that the bad weather was coming through Charlotte. Well, that was unless we wanted to pay an extra $400 something dollars per person.
So after our first flight from Orlando to Charlotte was delayed, we eventually landed in Charlotte, a lot later than planned. We turned on our phones to an email that our next flight home to Austin was canceled.
After a couple of hours of trying to figure out how to get home, we realized there were no options that night. We even tried renting a car to drive home, but there were no cars available.
The kids and I took the hotel shuttle while Morry stayed at the airport a little longer hoping to get our luggage.
As soon as the boys and I checked into our hotel room, around 10:30pm, I ordered a couple of pizzas from Domino’s.
We waited and waited for our pizzas. I even called to check on them and was told they would be coming soon.
In the meantime, Morry came to the hotel finally but without our luggage. American said our luggage would be sent to Austin the next day on the first flight out.
After two hours of no pizzas, and completely exhausted, I finally called to cancel our pizza order and get a refund.
We ate snacks from the gift shop for dinner at almost 1am and then went to sleep.
We woke up at 6:30am Friday morning to head back to the airport to try to get a flight home.
After a crazy day, trying flight after flight to fly standby we eventually were able to get on a flight to San Antonio.
Only one of our suitcases (mine) made it to San Antonio.
The cheapest way to get all of us back to Austin was with a rental car. So funny thing about the rental car. We just wanted to get home last night from San Antonio and they said for $30 extra we could have the BMW and drive it right then, otherwise, we would have to wait about 10 minutes for another car. So we went with the BMW, although it took us about 10 to 15 minutes to even figure out how to start the car and put it into drive. We had to actually Google it.
We finally got back to our house around 8:30pm last night.
This afternoon, the other suitcase was delivered to our house.
Our kids were troopers. All of the airline staff were super friendly and helpful. I don’t know how people did it with young kids or even babies. What a mess!
After Evan’s baseball game this afternoon, we drove back to San Antonio to return the rental car. We had to return it to SA or pay a large fee for not returning it at the pickup location.
Since we had such a crazy last few days, we are celebrating Noah's birthday today and tomorrow rather than packing everything in in one day.
Today, he chose Wholy Bagel for lunch and Black Rock lavender lemonade to drink. Wholy Bagel made his sandwich wrong, so I had to go back out to pick up the correct one after we got home. They threw in several desserts to make up for it.
When we went to pick up the car in San Antonio, we stopped at Genghis Grill on the way home. Noah loves that restaurant, but we no longer have one in Austin.
When we got home, he Facetimed with Michael, Jen, Maya, and Artie and then Grandma and Papa.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment