California Vacation: Thursday

We were supposed to fly out of Grand Rapids at about 7:40 PM on Thursday night. We were supposed to connect in Chicago and take the last flight of the day to LAX. It may come as a shocking surprise to you, but that didn't happen.

Our flight out of Grand Rapids taxied into take off position about a half hour behind schedule and waited for the good word from Chicago to take off (Chicago was holding us off due to rain and strong winds). We ended up waiting on the runway for what seemed, especially to Alex, like forever, but was probably more like an hour.

It really wasn't too bad, especially since Alex had a grand old time cavorting around the mostly empty rear portion of the plane and making friends with the flight attendant and several passengers. He did have one near disaster when his feet slipped off the armrest he was climbing on and he found himself diving head first toward the floor while his mother and the flight attendant watched in horror. I saw it happening in slow motion and my body was taken over by a kind of papa superpower as my arms neatly inserted themselves under his freefalling body with the speed of lightning, swooped him up softly as his hair brushed the floor, and flipped him back up to the safety generally reserved only for those standing upright on solid ground.

Eventually we did take off. This gave us a chance to think with great concern about our connecting flight in Chicago, but we were reassured by the flight crew that all the flights out of Chicago were also delayed, and that we would be fine.

When we got to O'Hare Sarah threw Alex in the carry pack, front style, and we rushed to the nearest flight monitor. It showed that our flight to LAX was currently boarding. So we ran 0.4 miles (at the least, I just measured it on Google Earth) with all our luggage from our arrival gate in Terminal G to our departure gate in Terminal H. When we arrived the gate was closed, the flight was gone, and we were very, very sweaty and very, very disappointed.

We ended up staying the night in a Holiday Inn Express at the "distressed passenger" rate. Our stay lasted about 6 hours since we caught the first flight out to LAX in the morning. Alex and Sarah were able to sleep pretty well but I ended up tossing and turning the night away.

Overall we figured it really didn't work out too badly (except for the whole lack of sleep thing). Had our flights all gone as planned we would have been getting into LAX at 11 PM California time, with an hour car ride to Jeremy and Hannah's place in Irvine where we would have hit the sack immediately. As it ended up we got into LAX at 9:30 AM California time on Friday and were able to spend an hour in the car soaking in the sun and scenery on the way down to Irvine.