Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Travel Day

We started our trip back to Michigan for Thanksgiving on Wednesday morning. We had dropped Walt off at our friends' house the night before, so Wednesday morning was pretty low key. We flew out of Orange County - which I LOVE by the way (I think we waited all of 5 minutes in the security line on what was supposed to be one of the busiest travel days of the year - so chill there).


I had quite the "OH CRAP" moment while we were standing in line for security. Ryan, out of no where, asked me when my driver's license expired. I looked and it had ALREADY expired! It expired back in September (on my birthday). UH OH! I was really sweating it. I was worried that they were going to tell me I couldn't get on the flight. I have a valid passport, but it was at home (I guess I should travel with it as back-up, just in case). Thankfully they either didn't seem to notice or it wasn't a big deal because we made it through without a hitch. (And thankfully they didn't notice or care in Detroit either on the way back - but I still am NOT going to risk it over Christmas - off to the DMV!)

I have to say, my LockLaces came in very handy when dealing with security at the airport. No need to untie and retie. [[Check out my original review of these awesome little things here if you haven't already.]]


We had a layover in Chicago both on the way to Michigan and back. This time (unlike times before when we have had to RUN through the airport) we had about an hour and a half between flights. We walked around a bit to see what we wanted to eat and ended up settling on America's Dog - which had YUMMY vegetarian hot dogs (one with ketchup and a dill pickle on it for me) and vegetarian hamburgers (one with the works on it for Ryan). It was scrum-didily-umptious!


Another cool thing I noticed at O'Hare were the drinking fountains. I always try to travel with my own water bottle (that way we are buying less EXTREMELY overpriced items at the airport AND we are making less waste). Normally you have to tip it sideways and can't fill it all the way up in a normal drinking fountain. WELL, in comes the fountains at the O'Hare airport! They have a top spout (and it even had a filter that showed how much life was still left in it). I tell ya, it's the little things :)


One of my co-workers let me borrow a couple books for the flights, so on the way to Michigan I read Jesus > Religion and on the way back to California I read The Shack. Both of them were great little reads and helped the time to go faster.


Ryan hates red eye flights (since you don't get the best rest, so start off a little tired on your trip) and although I would prefer them (then you aren't losing a day of travel time that you could be enjoying), we took a day flight and ended up getting to Detroit around 6pm EST (after leaving our house around 2:30am EST). Not too shabby. We saw a beautiful sunset in Chicago when we were taking off. AMAZING, but COLD (I think we landed at O'Hare it was a blustery 19* - thankfully we didn't have to leave the terminal :) ).





All-in-all, for it being one of the "busiest" travel days of the year, it was pretty relaxed and smooth sailing for us - PRAISE THE LORD! And Ryan didn't even get gruffy (he likes going places, but doesn't so much enjoy the "art of travel").

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