An interesting journey

My plane was scheduled to leave McCook at 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday March 21st and I didn’t feel like that would be a problem for me since I’m usually up between 4 and 5 a.m. anyway. I slept for a couple of hours, then got up, finished packing, dressed and headed for the airport so I would get there at 4:45 which is recommended by Boutique Airlines.

Several people there knew me including the ticket agent and a couple of the TSA personnel and they were kind and friendly as they always are. After being screened, which is a lot shorter and less stressful than being screened in Denver, I and two other people boarded the plan for our flight to Denver. Because of the time change between here and there, we left at 5:30 and arrived in Denver at 5:30. My layover before my next flight was only an hour and a half but it turned into almost three hours because of an out-of-service plane. A different plane and crew was secured and we departed from Denver around 8:30 which was going to put most people on board in jeopardy of missing their connecting flights, including me.

I received a text from Delta Airlines shortly before take-off informing me that I had been re-booked on a later flight because of the lateness of the flight I was going to be on so I asked the lady at the check-in counter to check on that for me and she told me I had been re-booked but they had also kept my original booking on the earlier flight in case I made it on time. This we great customer service and I appreciated the effort made by them to make sure I wasn’t inconvenienced anymore than necessary.

I sat by a very pleasant lady from Denver in first class who was flying out to her and her husband’s second home around Hilton Head, South Carolina and because of our conversation, it made the flight go by much quicker. Just before we took off, the captain came back to the first-class section to explain to us what had happened to make the flight late and that they would do everything possible to make sure we made our original connections. This was amplified at the end of our flight by the flight attendant going through first class and telling everyone where their next plane was departing from and how much time we had to get there. I only had 25 minutes so it was pretty much a dead run for me because I had one of the furthest gates to get to. I was really concerned that I had missed the flight but the gate agent verified my ticket so I boarded the plane and the flight attendant, with a big smile on her face, told me they had been waiting on me. We took off a couple of minutes later and actually arrived at the Northwest Arkansas Airport a few minutes before our scheduled arrival time.

My son Michael picked me up at the airport, we went to my youngest son Will’s house in Fayetteville to pick up him and his wife and then went out to one of our favorite restaurants for food and drink. By the time we were finished, my long day had caught up with me and as soon as we got back to Will and Erica’s house, I went to bed and fell asleep faster than I have in a long time.

Michael and I left for Russellville the next morning but were going to have breakfast at a regular place of ours that, unfortunately, was shut down and locked up when we got there. So I went to Yelp to find alternate places to have breakfast and picked the one that was at the top of the list. One of the things I’ve learned from Yelp is that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure or vice versa because personal experiences don’t always agree with shared experiences and this was one of those times. Our breakfast was okay but nothing out of the ordinary and certainly not the “wonderful” breakfast that some people raved about on Yelp!

We arrived in Russellville shortly before noon and I quickly began sneezing and snorting, having forgotten about all the pollen in the air in Arkansas during this time of year. It’s the next day now (Thursday afternoon) and I”m still suffering from the same malady and hope it’s not with me for the whole trip because I’m taking my boys to Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Arkansas for the horse races on Saturday. Oaklawn is one of the top thoroughbred racing sites in American and they’re currently prepping for the Racing Festival of the South which will see crowds of 50,000 to 100,000 people each Saturday over the next month so it’s always a treat to go and be a part of that.

I don’t ever take trips when something out of the ordinary doesn’t happen and this one is no different, I still have four days left here and hope that the bad things are in my rear view mirror but I also know from past experience that that’s not an outcome I can reasonably expect!