The First Day Of Julie"s Amazing Whirlwind 11 day European Vacation

Day 1--My adventure begins on December 20th. Emily had driven in the night before in order to spend Christmas with the kids and so that Steve could drive us to the airport. In the morning we got up and had Christmas morning. Santa is a pretty smart guy and knew that I was not going to be home on Christmas Day so he came early.

We woke up to a white Christmas because we had about 18 inches of snow fall the day before. This was a little bit worrisome because we were supposed to fly out that night, but since they had the airport completely open we figured that we should be ok. We had a great morning knowing that since church was cancelled due to the snow we didn't have any obligations until I left for the airport that evening. We opened gifts and had our traditional big Christmas breakfast/brunch and then headed out to play in the snow.

After playing in the snow I had to bite the bullet and finish packing. I had really put things off because I hate to decide what I am going to want to wear a week from now when I can hardly decide what I want to wear that morning. I checked the status of our flight and found out that we were delayed an hour. Not a big deal because we had a 4 hour layover in London so we would still be fine to catch our connecting flight into Frankfurt. ( can you sense some foreshadowing) We got to the airport several hours early and were able to check in just fine. The problem came when the person who checked our baggage told us to go to gate D23, the board in the airport said to go B44 and our boarding pass said D38. Now we had to find someone to ask where in the world we were really supposed to go. Of course there was no one to be found. We spoke with several other people that we had seen in line and finally decided that we would head to D38 since that was the most official. When we got there there were other people waiting for our same flight so we decided (nervously) to stay. There were still no airline employees to be found. Our flight was originally scheduled to depart at 10pm with an hour delay at 11pm. At 11:15 we decided that since nobody had come to board us and we were still in the airport we were going to have longer than an hour delay. (NOW WE ARE TECHNICALLY INTO DAY 2) At about 12:30am the flight crew showed up and they started boarding at 1:15am. (Apparently they were waiting at gate B44) Once we were finally on the airplane the pilot came on and said that we would be another 45 minutes until all of our baggage was on board. After about 40 minutes he came back on and said that two people had decided not to fly and they now had to get the baggage off the airplane so they could get their bags. It is a good thing that nobody could see who it was that was leaving the flight or their lives were certainly going to be at risk. At 3:00am we finally taxied and took off. We were now officially going to miss our connection. We did have some delicious Raviolis for dinner at 4:30 in the morning.