Reflections of My Travel

What a long, long, long night! We arrived safely but certainly not easily. We got to the Atlanta airport last night right around 20:00, a decent interval for our 22:05 flight. I got a bit worried when it took forty-five minutes to get through the check-in but was relieved that our secret security point was completely empty so no holdup there. We got to the gate and the plane was showing on-time so we sat at the Chili’s right at our gate to get some dinner. While we were sitting eating, Randal got a call from his cousin (the one who lives in Taiwan). Turned out, he had just landed a few gates up from us. He stopped and chatted for a few minutes on his way to baggage claime. Small world sometimes, you know. At 22:03, the monitor was curiously still showing our flight as on-time when the guy came over the loud speaker to say that “the plane is here, we’re just not sure where it is or why it’s not at the gate yet”. Great. So it was about a little after 23:00 when we finally left Atlanta – one hour lost. Our plane was supposed to have a non-deplaning stopover in Vegas and then continue on to Sacramento. During flight, the pilot came on to say we were about an hour from Vegas where the plane would get put to bed for the night. Um… so we’re walking to Sacramento? We land, deplane, and walk way the heck to another terminal for the gate that our new flight is supposed to be leaving from. As we approach, we see many people lying down in the corridor. Not a good sign. We find out that the new flight is running two and a half hours behind for an estimated departure of 02:30. Not good since we were supposed to be arrived at Sacramento at 01:30 and ready to check into our airport hotel. We chose to join the throngs of people trying to get some sleep on the floors. We finally arrived in Sacramento just after 04:00 and waited around an hour for our luggage which never showed so we had to file a lost luggage claim before dragging our tired butts to the hotel all the way at the other terminal. We checked in just after 05:00, with the continental breakfast already underway. We managed to get a few hours of sleep before waking to make calls to try to get our luggage. The luggage arrived on a 10:30 plane and we were able to retrieve it around 11:00. Our ride, who was already waiting out front for us, was gracious enough to let us take a couple of quickie showers (the luggage lost had all of our toiletries). We then started heading towards Coloma where we were meeting up with the rest of our friend’s family at the campground. The rest of the day was pretty much spent relaxing and meeting people.