Long Road Home

Flying free is great, but getting to places can be a real pain. We realized that the flights we had booked were full and we wouldn't be able to get home so we decided to fly out of Vegas Saturday night instead of Sunday morning. We left Vegas at 6:15 and because of some delays, got into Chicago at 12:20 Sunday morning. We could either wait until 1:30 p.m. and try to fly to Columbia, which looked like we might get bumped, or we could fly to Charlotte at 6:30 a.m., rent a car and drive to Columbia. We decided to do the latter.

We had several hours to kill, so everyone slept - but me. I am always worried about sleeping and having something or someone get stolen. Fortunately, the kids are great travelers and used to the drill.

We made it to Charlotte without any problems. We picked up the rental, drove to Columbia and all crashed asleep, including me, for several hours.

Our bags were supposed to come in on our original flight - the Columbia flight - that got in at 5:30, so we headed to the airport to pick them up. Unfortunately, we discovered that our bags never left Chicago! For the first time in my 20+ years of flying, we tagged our own bags. No one checked them to see if it was done correctly, including me. So even though our boarding passes printed through to Columbia, our bag tags only printed through to Chicago. Sadly, had we known, we had plenty of time to go get the bags and recheck them since we had 5+ hours in Chicago.

We had to leave first thing Monday morning for our road trip, so we packed enough clothes for a couple of days all into one big suitcase and left, hoping our luggage would catch up to us eventually. Today our bags arrived in Columbia. They are going to forward them to Rochester tomorrow where hopefully we can claim them on Wednesday when we get to New York. Fingers crossed!