Graduation Celebration Trip: Day 1

To celebrate Mike's graduation with his B.S. and my PhD graduation, we took a trip. An adventure.

Mom & Dad dropped us off at Dulles, and we allowed the curbside dude to check-in our luggage for our flight to Salt Lake City via JFK New York. I was nervous when he said he couldn't find our boarding pass for the second leg, the one from JFK to SLC. So I asked him, "Are you sure our bags are checked all the way through to SLC?" They had the pink Transfer ticket on them, but I only saw the barcodes for JFK. He assured me they were good to go, so we went inside the airport. I immediately went back to ask again if the bags were checked properly. Another assurance that all was well.

Our trip to JFK was relatively uneventful, and even moderately pleasant since the pilot performed a smooth takeoff and landing. At JFK we had 3.5 hours to wait for the connecting flight. We examined the electronics vending machine which sells ipods and digital cameras and nintendo psps.


We had a nice dinner at a latino food restaurant, Revolucion. I had fajitas, Mike had tacos (big surprise).

And then we waited. And waited. And waited.

The plane finally started boarding about 1.5 hours late. It was now raining at JFK and there was little visibility. We taxiied FOR-EVER. Then the takeoff was jerky. The flight over all the bad weather in the great plains was quite bumpy... the seatbelt sign was on for most of the 5.5 hour flight. We napped a little, but didn't really get any sleep. Instead of arriving SLC at 11:40pm (local time), we arrived around 1:15am. When the luggage carousel stopped turning without producing our bags, I wasn't surprised just disappointed. Our bags had been picked up by the airline at JFK's luggage carousel. They indeed had not been tagged for the second leg of our trip. Instead of waiting and waiting, I should have gone to check on our luggage. And guess what! There's only one flight a day from JFK to SLC. You knew that was coming. So we called our hotel to come get us, waited forever for the shuttle, and checked-in to our room around 2:20am local time (which our brains were saying was about 4:20am).

Current plan: wait for luggage to arrive tomorrow night, thus staying an extra 24 hours here, then we're off to Mike's mom's house in Idaho.