Wait, what???

 3:34 pm - Wednesday - March 29th - Rancho Cucamonga, CA - 55° F, 47% humidity, wind 13 mph out of the west by northwest.....high today of 56° F has passed.  We're visiting with my daughter Sharon until we head to the airport around 8 pm for our 10 pm flight, so I thought I would get a jump on tomorrow's blog about today, Wednesday.

We were up early Wednesday morning as we wanted to be on the road by 8:00 am in order to be in Upland, CA by 10:30 am.  TLE and I are going through the process of obtaining TSA PreCheck® status for flying so we won't have to go through the long TSA lines at most airports, plus we will not have to take off our shoes, or open our computers.  We're hoping we will get our TSA number for our return trip from Atlanta.  

We managed to arrive at the IDENTIGO office just before 10:30 am for our 10:40 am appointments, and had been processed before 11 am....not bad.  As we exited INDENTIGO  we noticed there was a Office Depot on the other side of the parking lot.  I had wanted to find a new laptop 'sleeve' for my new Microsoft Surface Pro, so finding the Office Depot so close by was serendipitous to say the least.  I was able to find a laptop 'sleeve' made by Samsonite for $37 that was the perfect size, plus it is large enough to hold the accessories.....

....from there we drove over to The Hat to get our annual Pastrami Dip fix.  TLE and I split one of those, and got a side order of Onion Rings....I love this place.

Our next stop was Joel's Automotive where we left the Beetle to get the oil changed, and to have the turbo checked as we're getting a check engine light saying there is a vacuum, or some sort of connection issue.  Hopefully, it will be ready for us when we return on Monday.  We've been taking our cars to Joel since the mid 90's, so I'm sure he will come through for us!

Our daughter, Sharon, picked us up and drove us back to her home where we are now.  Around 6 pm we'll go out to dinner, and then our daughter Meredith will drop us off at the airport around 8 pm.  I'll finish the blog sometime Thursday.

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5:30 pm - Thursday - March 30th - Woodstock, GA - 73° F, humidity 19%, wind 6 mph out of the south by southeast......partly cloudy skies with a forecast high (already past) of 74° F.  

We met Meredith at the Panda Inn down near the Ontario Airport around 6 pm where we had a wonderful Chinese dinner of Orange Chicken, Crispy Garlic Chicken, some very good noodle dish, and some steamed white rice accompanied by non-stop, scintillating conversation.  After bidding adieu to Rod, Sharon, and Brayden Meredith drove us a few blocks to the airport where we arrived around 7:45 pm to check our bags, go through TSA security, and then wait to begin boarding the first leg of our flight to Las Vegas at 9:30 pm.  Everything went smoothly up to that point, but when we began the boarding process and had boarded around 50% of the passengers they all suddenly began to return to the lounge area....wait, what?

'Holding....'

We never found out why this happened, but were simply told our flight was on 'HOLD'....not exactly the words one wishes to hear at the beginning of a long fight to the east coast.  We did have a one hour layover in Las Vegas, but were beginning to get concerned with making that connection when the 'HOLD' was in its 40th minute.  Suddenly the boarding officer announced they would begin the boarding process again, and that we would be able to make all of our connections.....whew!

Once on the plane the pilot announced he would 'fly the plane like he stole it' to get us to Las Vegas in time for our 12:30 pm connection, and he did just that.  We landed in Las Vegas at 11:45 pm, just 30 minutes after leaving Ontario....wow!  Why don't they fly that fast all the time.....lol?

Our boarding pass for the 12:30 pm flight from Las Vegas to Atlanta indicated it would depart from Gate D-18, so upon disembarking from the plane we made tracks from gate E-8 over to D-18, which is quite a trek, only to find out they had changed our departure gate to E-9!  Wait, what?  We had disembarked right next to that gate.....why didn't they tell us the gate # had changed?

At any rate we hoofed it back to gate E-9, and boarded the plane with just 5 minutes to spare.  Flight 2000 took off a few minutes early, and for the next 3 hours and 18 minutes we cruised ever eastward to Atlanta.  TLE and I napped a little over that 3 hours, and eventually as we descended into Atlanta we saw the sun rising.....

....we actually landed about 10 minutes early at 7:05 am but for TLE and I it was 4:05 am, and we were tired!

I'll save the rest of the story for tomorrow's blog post about Thursday....thanks for stopping by!