Graduation Celebration Trip: Day 3

You'll be just STUNNED to know that our luggage did NOT arrive at 1:50am.

It appears that no one asked JFK to send the luggage... JFK is still waiting for us to pick up the luggage. So the baggage office sent an email and left voice mail messages and said they would call us around 6am to let us know what the update was.

It was then about 2:45, so we waited for the 3:00 shuttle. Which never came. I called the hotel, and they said "Oh, we didn't know anyone needed the shuttle." I was crying. While waiting for the shuttle, I call Mom & Dad to ask their advice on what to do, since we are running out of time to arrive in Vancouver, which is a 16 hour drive from Salt Lake City which we were previously going to accomplish over 3 days. They advice we turn in the rental car and buy a ticket to Seattle and have the luggage meet us there.

When we get back to the hotel, we ask if the Walmart is a 24 hour one. They think so, so we brush about 2 new inches of snow off the rental car and creep over to the Walmart, narrowly avoiding being squashed by a snowplow in a hurry.

We buy a few clothes to help us get through the next 24 hours, then get back to the hotel at about 4:30am. I get online and book us plane tickets to Seattle for that evening. I call Hertz and tell them I'm bringing back the car and that I want to get on in Seattle instead. It will actually be about 50% cheaper this way since the car will be picked up and returned to SeaTac instead of being a one-way rental from Salt Lake City to Seattle.

At 7:30am I haven't received a call from the baggage office, so I call them and leave a message. At 9:30 I wake up Mike and we go return the rental car. The Hertz phone people had said it would cost me $387 for the 24 hours that I had had the car. The receipt I got in the parking lot was $79. So we'll see how that works out on the credit card bill.

Finally I get a call from the baggage people that our luggage should meet us in Seattle, about 1 hour after we are due to arrive ourselves. The hotel lets us stay in our room until 6pm, charging us just half-a-day. We finally get to sleep from about 11:30am to 5pm. This is the longest period of sleep we've had in 3 days. We check out and go to the airport and wait 3 hours for our flight to Seattle.

When we check in we find out the plane is 99% full. There are exactly 2 empty seats in the entire plane of 160 passengers. Ugh! We're both in middle seats, but at least we're in the same row so we can see each other. We're in "Zone 9"...the very last people able to board, so we barely find someplace for our carryon bags, buy putting them SEVERAL bins behind our seats. The girl I'm sitting next to has to have an attendant find her room for her bag.

The flight wasn't too bad until right at the end when awful winds push us sideways and tilt us side to side just as we're about to land. Very scary. Amazingly we have landed just a few gates down from the flight where our luggage will eventually land. We wait about an hour, then go to the luggage carousel. And about half way through the luggage drop, there's our luggage! YEAH!

We shuttle over to the Radisson and drop into our Sleep Number Bed. We both hate it. It was exactly like when I was a child and we went camping often. We had those camping air mattresses that we had to blow up ourselves. When you kneel on it, your knee sinks to the ground and the ends pop up. When you roll to one side quickly, the air bunches up behind you and tips you onto the floor. That's what its like sleeping on a Sleep Number Bed. We won't be getting one. We both actually really like the temperpedic 4-inch mattress topper that the Marriott Courtyard uses.

Now that we have clothes, (and makeup!!!) things should be looking up, right?

Stay tuned for Tomorrow's Adventure....