to something resembling a normal schedule, I am happy to be able to look forward to what comes next. Which in this house is school starting. The trip to Oregon was fun, but a lot of traveling, as I did five flights in four days, along with a fair amount of driving. The high points were seeing my grandparents, seeing the Junior Mad Scientist get her first driving lesson, and... teaching my kids about travel adventures.
I mean, it's not like having hitches in travel plans are fun. But they are part of any sort of travel - I can and will complain about flying in our country, with some of the ridiculousness inherent in the system, but trains and automobiles are just as much a PITA when they go awry. So teaching the kids how to take a deep breath, run for it if you are delayed in your connection, or just roll with the punches when a flight is delayed sufficient to miss all connecting flights lets try this again tomorrow and go get a hotel, these are important lessons.
I was joking that the trip home was going to be a saga of epic whining, as the plan was to fly home overnight from OR to OH. With the Little Man, who is shortly turned twelve. It turned into a saga, all right, but there was very little whining. There was a lot of learning, and I was very happy that he did handle it all well. He's actually looking forward to the next trip, although he did say he didn't want to do this again this year. That's fine, neither do I!
Things I learned:
Pack my inhaler. Running through an airport does Bad Things to my lungs, and makes my daughter worry about me.
Call ahead. I trusted the information desk people at the little airport and when they said the hotel was just across the street, we walked... and discovered that not only did we have to walk through a construction site, we also had to cross a five-lane busy road with no crosswalks and no sidewalks to reach said hotel, only to learn that it was booked full. We trekked back to the airport (it was 95* and dusty) called in reservations and requested a shuttle... much better. And we got a shuttle at 3 am when we had to be back at the airport.
Pack the camera charger. I packed a spare, charged (I thought) battery, but didn't throw in the charger. Turns out the extra battery didn't take a charge, so I didn't take as many photos as I would have liked.
Use the cell camera: it turns out my cell phone takes very nice photos. So I will use it more when the good camera isn't available for whatever reason.
Pack Spares: I didn't have a spare wall charger for phone/devices, just mine, but my son managed to lose his, so we shared on the trip home. Lesson learned to pack another one. And he killed his headphones, so I wanted another pair of those (and the prices in the airport were insane).
Overall, it was a good trip. We just had some hiccups. Hopefully the next one will be even smoother if I remember to look back at mistakes made, and plan for the situations to happen again.