The Trip to Seattle

I suspect that Craig was somewhat horrified when I told him we would ALL be flying to Seattle for Grandma Bentley's funeral.  Because my sisters and I were Grandma's only grandchildren, I felt like I needed all of us to be there for her funeral.  I couldn't rely on my cousins and their children to fill out the chapel a bit, like I did for my Grandma Hansen.  (And it turns out that when you outlive all your friends, there are much less people who can attend your funeral.)

Fortunately for our bank account, my Dad and aunt used funds from my Grandma's estate to pay for everyone's travel expenses.  We couldn't have done it without their generosity.

The other complication in all this was that we already had plans to go to Great Wolf Lodge for a couple days to take a mini-break from winter (this will have to be the subject of another blog post).  We were leaving Sunday, returning Tuesday evening.  The funeral was planned for Friday, so that gave me Wednesday to do all the laundry and get all prepared, and Thursday to pack and then fly.  Whew!  And, just to make sure I was really on my A-game, a friend from out of town had an interview in Charlottesville on Wednesday, so I also spent a couple hours playing tour guide to him!  Double whew!

Anyway, I spent those two days a madwoman of preparations and planning.  And then I spent all Thursday morning packing, cleaning, packing some more, and cleaning some more.  The stupid airline was charging $25 per suitcase, so I was determined to keep things to the bare minimum, but when you have to dress all seven of you up nicely for three days of your trip, that's still a lot of stuff!  Plus all activities and food for everyone for the plane, and a safari trip in Africa might have been less complicated.

But I did it!  I loaded the car, picked the kids up from school, picked Craig up from work, and we were off to the airport!  I'd also dressed up all the kids in their bright orange UVA shirts, hoping this would make them less likely to get lost at the airport.

When I purchased our tickets and the airline lets you choose your seat (but really, they're mostly trying to coerce you into paying for the nicer seats), there were only 6 seats to choose from left on the small plane from Charlottesville to Charlotte, NC.  That had me completely stressed out, and we got to the airport even earlier than normal in case this was going to be a problem.  It turned out to not matter and the airline was very nice about making sure we were all seated together.  But the extra time meant that Craig could run back out to the car and get Ryder's sweatshirt when he left it there (the ONE warm item I packed for each kid, and my 6-year-old decides to leave his in the car!!!!).  So that was good.  And it was good that the Charlottesville airport is tiny, so going through security twice wasn't a big deal-- we couldn't have done that at a big airport, and Ryder would have been very cold in Seattle.

Ryder makes himself comfortable on the floor of the Charlotte airport

The trip out was hard.  We were arriving in Seattle around 9:30pm which is after midnight east coast time.  Camille fought against sleeping on the plane and spent a couple hours of the flight just crying in my arms.  So that sucked.  But Ryder and Colton slept great and Bentley and Kendra were wonderful and made friends with some kids across the aisle from them.  And I had just gotten Anna Kendrick's memoir Scrappy Little Nobody from the library, so that kept me entertained.

When I flew to LA for my other Grandma's funeral, everything went wrong-- my first flight was delayed, which made me miss my connecting flight.  On the return trip, I ended up spending two extra hours on the plane (AFTER the six hour flight!!!!) because of weather issues and then the subsequent back-up that this had caused.  Which, then, once again, made me miss my connecting flight.

So while the trip to Seattle was hard, everything actually went very smoothly.  But flying across the country with a 2-year-old is always hard.

Craig started out with these two, but Colton migrated over to my lap to sleep

Camille had just turned two, so she got her own seat, although she spent most of the flight on my lap.  I worked very hard to not let her squish Colton, who was also on my lap.  Fun!

We landed in Seattle, found all our luggage (some of it had gotten set aside, causing me to momentarily panic), actually caught a shuttle that was just sitting there waiting for us to push our way on (everyone was SUPER nice about making room, giving up seats to the kids, and helping haul our suitcases on board-- I love Seattle people), and picked up our rental car.  Punched the ferry terminal address into the GPS and we were off!  We even caught the next ferry without any trouble, so that was nice.  I had been fearing that we'd pull in just in time to see it leave and that would have made me cry, so I'm glad that didn't happen.

We'd made it!  We were home.