A Trip Back To The Midwest

This year our travel plans have us moving up and down the Rocky Mountains.  The closest we will be to our former homes in the Midwest is around 1,200 miles.  It would be a huge side trip to drive the motor home or the car to the Midwest and back.  So, this year we have decided that we will each take turns flying back to visit family.  One will fly the other will stay with the motor home and the Alley cat.

Gary needed to go back on some family business related to his Mother’s death so last week he flew back turning the trip into visits with his family.  That was a big part of the reason we set up our travel plans to get to Albuquerque – so that Gary could fly from a reasonably sized airport of which there are very few in Western Texas and New Mexico.  Staying put also allowed me to get into some deep cleaning of the motor home and gave me time to bond with Alley.

Being retired for a few years, Gary hadn’t flown much.  His last couple of flights were in 2010 when he flew to buy the motor home and then to buy the tow car.  So after nearly three years of not flying what happens?  He got caught up in a 5 hour nationwide computer outage of American Airlines with all of their planes grounded.  He had dutifully arrived two hours early at the Albuquerque airport only to then wait a total of 7 hours for his plane to depart, only knowing that he was likely to get to Dallas and not knowing if he would be able to connect on from there to Indianapolis.  Fortunately he could but his checked bag didn’t arrive in Indy on the same flight with him.  But given the stack up in flights, the bag arrived on the next flight only about half an hour behind the flight he was on.  Gary arrived at the door of his sister’s house in the Indianapolis area 13 hours after he left the door of our motor home in what was then in the midst of a driving rain storm.  Maybe this fly back idea is not the greatest after all.

But from there things got a lot better.  He got to see his family in Indiana and then drove on over to Columbus, Ohio to see his son Andy and daughter-in-law Natasha.  He had the opportunity to spend a long weekend with them.  As fairly new homeowners, they always have things that need to be done around the house.  When we were last there, Gary noticed that the driveway could use a dressing so he took some clothes with him that needed to be trashed anyway and did them the job of coating it.  Looks pretty good, eh?  Maybe he can still do something productive.

But he is back at the motor home now and the kitty and I are glad to have him back.