Those of you that know me know that I love to travel. And for the most part, traveling has not been a problem. Well, that did change a little bit last week; but I still love to travel.
I had flown into Atlanta on Thursday with three co-workers, including my manager, for a meeting on Friday. The flight into Atlanta was uneventful and we even arrived about 10 minutes ahead of schedule. We had heard that there were some storms headed to Dallas, but didn't really think about it because rain is rain.
We had our meeting on Friday, then headed over to one of our offices in Atlanta to meet the staff and get a tour. While we were meeting with one of the managers in the office, we all started getting travel updates on our cell phones. You know the kind - flight delayed, then flight delayed again. Within about an hour, my manager (who happens to have Gold Platinum status) received a text that the flight was cancelled. Normally this would not cause me any panic, but John and I were scheduled to fly to Albuquerque early Saturday afternoon to attend a memorial service for the younger sister of his good friend Roy. For those of you who don't know, Roy and John went to high school and played football together. John and I have enjoyed Roy and Tracy's hospitality during spring training for the last three years.
Unfortunately, it seemed that the storm in Dallas was more severe than predicted and they ended up closing the airport for about four hours causing numerous delays and cancellations. We desperately tried to find a flight out later Friday evening, but were unsuccessful, so we ended up having to stay another night in Atlanta.
As I said earlier, this normally would not have caused an issue, but I only had clothes and other necessities for a one night trip. As soon as Sara got home from work, she and I were on the phone so that she could pack what I needed for the trip to Albuquerque. The plan was that she would pack for me and John would bring it to the airport and meet me at the gate. The plan worked pretty darn good. My flight from Atlanta got into Dallas Saturday morning with plenty of time to spare, John met me at the gate for our flight, and off we went to Albuquerque.
We landed in Albuquerque, got our rental car and headed to the hotel. Once we got checked in, I started unpacking our things so that they could be hung up. I got to the bottom of the suitcase and still had not seen the shoes to wear with my dress for the service. I called Sara and asked if she had remembered to pack them, which she had. It seems that John had decided to consolidate our things into one suitcase (not a bad idea at all), but left my shoes sitting in the bedroom. Oh well, since we had some time, off we went to go shoe shopping. Hard to do when one of the people shopping doesn't enjoy it. :)
Luckily I was able to find some fairly quickly and we were able to enjoy the rest of the weekend. We visited with Roy's family, who are great people, and attended the memorial service. We also had a chance to visit Old Town Albuquerque and take a trip on the Tram up Sandia Peak. It was a beautiful site. Then up really early Monday morning (3:30am MT) to catch a flight back to Dallas and off to work for the day.
We were both a little tired Monday evening, but were really glad that we made the effort to go. And I still love to travel. In fact, I am scheduled to go to Florida next week, then Vegas in June and off to Michigan in July to visit with Cindy. I know - I have a rough life!
