To California! Five Airports Later...

I never want to fly again.

Of all the things to go wrong yesterday, wouldn't you know it, we missed our flight!  You know, the one that we bought a month ago to fly to California for our IVF procedure?  What was I saying about irony?  Yeah, I'm telling you fate does not want us to succeed!

Early yesterday morning we arrived at the airport at 6am, a whole hour before our departure.  It's a small airport with only 1 flight to Seattle per day on one of those little propeller planes.  Upon check-in, we were told that our luggage would cost us $70 since one of the bags was 8 lbs overweight.  Rather than sit down and unpack them to try and even out the weight, we opted to fork out the money and rolled our eyes.  We figured something would go wrong that day, but little did we know that would be the least of our worries!

We then went to stand in the long line at the security check point and watch as they checked people through and inspected everyone's stuff as they do, you know.  They were taking their own sweet time and there was this poor elderly gentleman who they sent in and out of the metal detector about 20 times because he kept setting off the alarm.  Finally, when he was nearly stripped of all clothing, they got him through.  I was getting rather irritated because I was carrying a bag of injectable medication.  Filled with needles and syringes and liquid vials--all the things that airports freak out about.  Of course I declared my bag of drugs and they had to take everything out and search it, then give ME a "random" search while they pulled out and inspected everything in my bag.  When they were done, they handed me back my bag in a bin with all the drugs they pulled out and told me to hurry up and pack it back up because they were going to close the gate.  I did so and met Mike at the gate with several other people who were just all standing there watching out the glass window at the plane.  

Five minutes later everyone was through the security checkpoint and there were about 20 of us standing there watching as they rolled the stairs away and shut the door, then pulled away.  "Are you serious?" people started asking each other, obviously shocked.  No one could believe they would actually just leave us all there!  It wasn't even 6:50 yet, and our plane loaded on our "overweight" luggage and took off without us and 20 other passengers!  Imagine how much weight 20+ people are compared to 8 lbs of an overweight bag.  Along with an angry mob of passengers, we went to the front desk in order to figure out what we were supposed to do then, and the woman there only yelled at us all and blamed US for being "late"!  That wasn't very well accepted by anyone because we were hardly late!  There was a lot of yelling going on between her and the other passengers, so by the time Mike got up there, we knew all we could do was transfer our tickets to another flight and I went to call back my brother who had dropped us off an hour ago by then.

$200. later, we got a flight to Seattle out of the next airport an hour away which left at 9:15am.  If we wanted to make that flight, we would have to hurry.  My brother came back and we were on our way by 7:30.  We made it in plenty of time, even though I was once again subjected to a "random" search and my bag of medication was clawed through and searched for a second time.  We got to Seattle at about 10am and finally relaxed and had breakfast so we could take our pills.  The next flight was a half hour flight to Portland at noon which we were separated halfway across the plane from each other during, and our final flight to Oakland, CA didn't leave until about 2:30, so we had plenty of time to wander around and find a horrible place to eat a spot of lunch before leaving.  This final flight was our original flight to Oakland, so we had caught up with our luggage finally and arrived at 4pm, as planned.  While waiting for Mike's parents (who were caught in traffic) to pick us up, we thought about how much money we had spent on this trip (over $1,000) and vowed that next time, we might as well DRIVE and save ourselves the insanity!!!!