Friday, September 21st 2018
Los Angeles, CA and Shalimar, FL
It’s 2pm and I am standing outside of my office waiting on a Lyft to LAX. I’ve been at my new job for about 6 weeks and I already need to take time off to visit my grandmother for her 92nd birthday. In an effort to minimize time out of the office, I am flying out to Florida on Friday afternoon and back in on Sunday. This is going to whirlwind trip and I hope everything goes smoothly.
By 4:30pm my flight to Dallas is boarding, as planned. I am armed with 2 liters of water, a bag of pili nuts, 2 Bulletproof collagen bars, Ready Player One and season one of Atypical. The airplane is enormous and I settle into my aisle seat and immediately turn on Ready Player One. The movie is surprisingly good and I am so into it that I don’t even notice we are still on the ground until it ends. Ah man, this does not fare well for my connecting flight.
Eventually we take off. I order coffee from the the drink cart and proceed to watch most of Atypical before I hear an announcement from the captain. He says that we may have noticed that we have been circling Dallas for the last few hours (I had not) and that we will soon run out of gas (wait, what?). He says that we can not get into the Dallas airport due to weather and that we are going to go land at El Paso (ugh).
An hour later, in El Paso, I am on my 3rd cup of airplane coffee and halfway through my bag of pili nuts. We can not get off the plane because the jetway is too small to connect to. I am in the way back of the plane and most passengers have a good attitude about the situation. About 2 hours later, we are back in the air in attempt number 2 to land in Dallas.
At 2:15am I am finally deplaning in Dallas. My American app has deleted the boarding pass to my connecting flight, so I am pretty sure that I’m stuck here. As one of the last passengers off the plane, the line at the ticket counter is already very long. I wander over to the flight status board and see that my connecting flight has not left yet. Whoa, I can not believe that plane is still here. It’s scheduled to leave in 45 minutes.
I easily make it to my next gate and my flight into Pensacola goes as planned. I even get an empty seat next to me, I guess 3:30am is not a popular time to fly. When I arrive in Pensacola I beeline to the rental car booth. I grab one of the last cars from Alamo and end up getting upgraded to a small SUV. I ask the rental guy if my grandmother will be able to get into this kind of SUV and he dryly replies yes. Oh well, this is my only option.
Around 4:30am I start my 1.5 hour drive to Shalimar. At one point I pull over for a snack, but end up only buying a diet Dr. Pepper. I am strangely not hungry. A bag a peli nuts and 2 liters of water goes farther than you would think.
I pull into the Bob Hope Village at 6am. My grandmother has booked me a room in her her retirement community and the 24 hour guard is supposed to show me to the room and give me a key. There is no guard at the gate and it appears that parking lot is being prepared as part of a route for a 5K run. I find a phone number on the door of the guard booth and wait nearly 10 minutes for someone to come and get me. By 6:15am I am finally settled in my room. I have plans to meet my grandmother for breakfast at 7:30am, so I use the next 1 hour and 15 minutes to shower, nap and meditate.
At 7:30am sharp I am knocking on her door for our birthday breakfast date.
