A Christmas Miracle

This year we planned to spend Christmas with my family in Washington. I had been looking forward to it all year especially since all five of my siblings and their families would be there.

Niel was scheduled for a half day at the clinic on the 23rd. Unfortunately, they overbooked his schedule. I got really nervous when he still wasn't home from work ten minutes before we were supposed to leave for the airport. At that point I called him to make sure he was almost home. Niel told me he still had three more patients to see and he still had to dictate all of his notes.

Luckily, Niel left the clinic shortly after and they rescheduled his patients. We were still running half an hour behind schedule since he got home so late. I had been running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to pack everything for both of us and getting our winter clothes out of the storage unit. We dashed off to the Las Vegas airport in a mad rush. Naturally, we hit really bad traffic on our way there. It was our first time flying out of the Las Vegas airport so we didn't know where to go. The automated telephone directions said to take the wrong exit. First we took the wrong exit and then once we got turned around we went the wrong way to long term parking. By the time we parked in long term parking, took the shuttle to the terminal, and walked to our ticket counter (last ticket counter on the opposite end) our plane was scheduled to depart in ten minutes. To make matters worse, my bag was overweight so I had to shuffle everything around. The lady at the ticket counter told us all flights were overbooked to Washington until Christmas morning. She said we could try standby on the next flight which was overbooked and had 10+ people on standby ahead of us.

That is the point when I completely lost it (I had already lost it previously). Full blown breakdown at the ticket counter as I realized spending Christmas Eve and Christmas morning with my family in Washington might not happen after all. We decided to take our chances and go on standby on the next couple flights. Our other option was to buy additional tickets through Southwest. We didn't get on the first flight on standby but somehow we managed to get on the next flight to Seattle. There were two open seats on the connecting flight from Seattle to Spokane with thirty minutes in between flights. We were running from one terminal to the next to make our connector flight. We made it to Spokane at midnight and were amazed to see our bags had somehow managed to make it also.

By 3:00 a.m. we were safe and sound in Quincy, Washington. I really felt like it was a Christmas miracle that we made it to my home in Washington after missing our original flight less than 48 hours before Christmas. Here is a happy photo of us at my parent's house taken after we had recovered from the not-so-happy traveling fiasco.