Home.

I'm up. The trip home was long and quite arduous.  The hotel we stayed at the last night was wonderful - really a great way to end the trip. I turned in early and was up at 3am to give myself plenty of time to have coffee and make sure I took everything. I laugh because years ago I would worry about leaving toiletries and now I worry about leaving power cords and electronics. I said good bye to the babies and Brandi the night before, I was missing them before I even left, whatever did I do before I became a grandmother? Jackson knocked around 4 am and we got to the airport for no reason at all at 4:30. I should have looked at the size of it because it was me, 3 security people and a couple of others - it was such a tiny airport with gates A through E all in the same room. Sigh. Whatever, the coffee bar was open and I had my Ereader. 

I flew from Bellingham to Seattle and had a two hour layover, then from Seattle to Fort Worth Texas and another two hour layover. Anyone thinking OMG about that please remember I had spent four and a half days in car driving almost a total of 2500 miles - the layovers were VERY welcome. I had to ask the time in Dallas - I crossed all the time zones and I was worried I would miss my plane as everything I owned at that point had a different time on it. My first two flights were packed and I had accidently booked the middle seat which was not as bad as I thought it would be. I had enough room to knit and read and that's the important thing, isn't it? They no longer serve peanuts on any flights which I found very annoying, I like the peanuts but you know we have so many namby pamby allergy people now, we all have to suffer. During my layover in Texas I had to go sit at the other end of the gate, there was a woman who I swear could talk the ears off a brass monkey - the entire time she never shut up, it was almost as amazing as it was annoying. I was actually thinking about rescuing her poor co-workers who were shifting around in thier seats,unable to flee from her nonstop soliloquy - but I ran after 20 minutes of her going on about how much she liked her headphones - it was me or them.

My last flight was packed too and I took the middle seat, the woman who had the window seat seat sighed when they announced it was another packed flight. Every seat was taken.... except our aisle seat! The flight attendant came back and asked if either of us was Maria Squires who apparently didn't make her flight - bad for her, good for us! I popped over to the aisle seat while my seatmate was celebrating - I told her not to jinx it or Maria would come jogging down to claim her seat. We piled our stuff on the empty seat and stretched out our legs in our newly acquired space, it made the last flight more than tolerable. I found my baggage claim ticket as I anticipated the possiblity of lost luggage since it had to be shuffled multiple times but when I arrived at baggage it was - for the first time EVER - one of the first bags. David was on time but does not like to drive in the dark, so after 2500 mile and 19 hours I drove us home - I was beyond tired last night. But I'm home and have been well greeted by my canine posse. I'm glad to be back, but boy, do I miss everyone.