Average Jane’s Travel Adventures

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I flew to Asheville, North Carolina last week and attended the Type A Mom Conference. It was great seeing so many bloggers I had met before and meeting new ones. The relatively small size of the conference reminded me of BlogHer in the early days.

I was traveling with my colleague, @jdeatherage, and we were a bit pressed for time when we left the conference hotel on Saturday afternoon. After a quick stop at a FedEx/Kinko's store to drop off some packages, we made our way to the airport a little too close to our flight time for comfort.

Fortunately, there was no security line and we got into the gate area quickly, only to discover this:

Twitpic by Jill Asher of Silicon Valley Moms Blog.

After about an hour, the airline announced that they had an update for us: we'd be getting another update in an hour. That was all it took for us to decide to go back into the main part of the airport in search of some dinner.

We'd ordered taco salads and were about eight bites in when there was an announcement over the airport loudspeaker that our flight was leaving in ONE MINUTE, and they began calling for us by name. You can imagine the chaos that ensued as we scrambled to pay for our mostly-uneaten food and dash back through security.

The security personnel couldn't have been nicer as they got us through the scanners. We ended up sprinting through the terminal and tiptoeing across the open, extremely wet boarding ramp in our stocking feet, but we made it onto the plane.

We were sure we'd missed our connecting flight in Atlanta (the airline had booked us a backup flight, just in case), but it turned out that all of the flights there were delayed, too. Delayed and delayed and delayed. Our erstwhile 7:20 p.m. flight was showing a 9:00 p.m. estimated takeoff time, so we made our way to TGIFriday's and continued our airport progressive dinner with some miscellaneous appetizers and a couple of chocolate martinis.

We waited another hour or so at the gate and eventually got on the plane and made it to Kansas City right around midnight. Our original arrival time was supposed to be 8:00 p.m.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my flights this Thursday and next Monday go much more smoothly!