Alaska Trip

I have to admit that I wasn't as excited about this trip as I could have been. I HATE cold weather. I hate flying. Mike is more Jason's friend than mine. Nine days was a long time to be away from the girls. The flight up... We flew standby. NEVER FLY STANDBY ON SATURDAY, SUNDAY, OR MONDAY. Bumped off 4 of 5 flights. Spent the night in the airport. Hey, we always complain that we don't get enough adventure. Monday morning comes around. Bumped off another flight. Not fully panicking. Make it onto the next flight to Minneapolis. Make it to Minneapolis, find our gate, go find some food. Everything's going fine. A little stressed, but nothing bad. And then... The standby list shows a family of 7 in the first 7 spots. What. The. Hell. That's when full blown panic sets in. I have to actually get up and go to the bathroom because I'm crying. We've already missed a day in Anchorage. And now this? The woman at the desk says the family of 7 will be called once and only once. So they start boarding. The standby list gets longer. Something like 22 people on the list, not near that many seats. Finally gets time to board standby. Family of 7 is called. And no one answers. She moves on. More people get called. No one shows up. A few people get called and board. More people get called. No one answers. They call us. Jason walks up there and asks how many. She tells him she has enough for us, so grab our stuff. I just start shoving stuff into bags and we run to the door. I cry and shake the whole way to the plane. Get on the plane and realize there are 3 seats per row. Jason is center seat on one, I'm aisle on another. The guy in the aisle seat by Jason realizes that we're together and swaps seats with me so that we can sit together. Flight is pretty smooth, just long. We get there and suddenly it's daylight again. Craziness. Find our bags that got there the day before. Then go find a taxi. Of course we get the guy from Somalia that's only been in country 4 days. Who of course doesn't have GPS. Figures. Jason has just enough charge on his phone left to get us to Mike's house. The drive was gorgeous. Mountains everywhere that still had snow on them. And it was broad daylight out. Hard to believe it was after 9 pm.