My husband said it just seems too good to be true. And it was.
We were cautiously optimistic about getting out on a space A flight to Hawaii for mid-winter break. There was a flight going out Saturday morning, showtime was 11am. It seemed perfect.
We called several times throughout the night to be sure the flight wasn't suddenly cancelled or showtime moved back. As of 7am, it was still on. We took our time with our final packing, played around a bit, ran an errand, and Mike called again at 10am, just to reconfirm. That's when we were told, "Oh, that flight left about 15 minutes ago." Shocked doesn't begin to tell you how we felt. Flights are canceled, delayed, broken down, but they don't leave 3 1/2 hours EARLIER than scheduled!
The kids cried, I wanted to cry but figured I was too old to cry, and we packed the car and headed to California. Mike called a few friends who checked the schedule of flights leaving out of Travis AFB, which is a 12 hour drive from our house. At the time, there were 3 flights leaving for Hawaii on Sunday.
We drove through the night (totally naive to the fact that we would drive through several mountain passes with potential for great driving hazards this time of year). We arrived at apx 1am; checked in at the terminal, helped a very distraught military wife (she had come home from Alaska for her grandmother's funeral, driven 1,000 miles roundtrip to the funeral and back to Travis, and had been trying to get a flight back to Alaska for a week now. She showed up for the flight at 1am, only to be told the flight had removed all seats to add more cargo. She folded her official documents, sobbed while she phoned her husband and told him about the flight, wheeled her huge suitcase over to a seat, held her two small children and cried and cried.
We finished checking in and Mike and I loaded her, her luggage, and her children into the van and drove them back to the hotel, where, thankfully, she was able to get back into her room. Her next chance to get a flight would be in two days.
We slept in the terminal, too afraid that if we went to a hotel, the flight would leave us again. At 7.40am the first flight, which had only 10 seats, filled up. The next flight had 22 seats. We couldn't believe that when they got to our names on the list, they had 3 seats left. We needed 5.
More tears, plan B hadn't worked, onto plan C.
Mallory wanted to go home. Lydia wanted to go to Palm Springs. I still wanted to go cry.
We got the map out and ended up heading towards Palm Springs. We decided to make a fun day of it. We drove to the Golden Gate Bridge, stopped by Golden Gate Seminary, had lunch at In N Out, and made it to Bakersfield, where we fell into bed, having now been awake for almost 36 hours.
The next day we hiked up to the Hollywood sign, met a family from Puyallup! (just up the road from us here in Washington:) got yelled at from a loud speaker telling us to "GET OFF THE MOUNTAIN. YOU ARE TRESPASSING. GET OFF THE MOUNTAIN NOW!"
We quickly got off the mountain, took a few pictures, and headed to Beverly Hills and Rodeo Dr. After a quick tour there, we GPS'd Chick Fil A, followed the directions east and grabbed our favorite food on our way to Palm Springs.
We really did have a great time. The resort was beautiful. The weather was perfect. The first night there, the girls made friends at the hot tub that they hung out with the whole week. We swam, laid out, read, slept in, floated in the lazy river, shopped and enjoyed the warmth of the sun.
We enjoyed the drive home and made great memories along the way. Our poor van thought she was driving us to the terminal two miles from our house and instead, 2,900 miles later, brought us safely back to Washington!
We don't understand why God didn't allow us to make it to Hawaii. Someday we may find out. Perhaps we will never know. Disappointment still creeps in occasionally when we think of how things should have worked out.
We have much to be grateful for, even with Plan C.
