New Orleans...Day one

How do you get ready for a trip? We are not normally early packing people. So it was not a surprise to find us delivering orders at 6:00 on Tuesday night, nothing packed and we had to leave the house at 3:30 AM on Wednesday. Nine and one half hours to wash a few things, pack and get a little sleep before we left was plenty. I even thought I had time to throw a few highlights in my hair. The thing that was not planned was a fluoride pill up the nose of a screaming four year old. Having experienced a button up the nose of his aunt when she was three years old, I dumped my "packed" purse, grabbed the visine, jumped in the car and flew to Jenn's house. By the time I got there he had blew it out and all that was left was to "play" for a little bit and leave. By the way, eye drops up the nose will shrink that capillaries and cause the item to loosen up. Just in case.....
Yesterday's day of travel continued to confirm Murphy's Law for me. Although I am not a "frequent" flyer, I usually fly a couple of times a year and I have NEVER flown anywhere without a carry on that has everything that I need to survive for a week on it. That is not surviving fashionably, but surviving none the less. I see people get on the plane with a laptop or a purse and nothing to struggle into overhead compartments and have longed to be them, however I always needed that security of knowing that should the airlines lose my luggage, I could live. Not this time...I was going to fly fashionable. I had my new glasses, no struggling in a plane restroom at 30,000 bumpy feet trying to hit my eye with a contact, I was set. What I did not factor in was the first day with the big B word in my glasses and the headache that would ensue from them. I love these shoes, but what I did not plan on was this.....
Sitting in the plane on the tarmac in Pittsburgh, the pilot comes on that he is having some "problems" with the airplane. Not what I want to hear, but I console myself that he is not telling us that mid-air. The glass is still half-full. He "reboots" the plane three times, power down, power up. power down....with a not happy one-year old in the seat behind me. I keep checking John's watch, (why would I wear my own?) and realize at one point that we are not going to make our connecting flight to New Orleans out of Detroit. We finally get out of Pittsburgh and we miss our connector by 4 minutes. A brisk run/walk from Gate 1 to 43 to rebook another flight, a line of over 100 people, we find the kiosks and manage to rebook to Atlanta, leaving from Gate 83, find that wait, wait, wait...finally board to Atlanta then go from A28 to B4 where amazingly enough we manage to get a flight to New Orleans....Georgia was a state that we were to fly over, not land in. Still in these shoes....

We finally land in New Orleans, head to baggage pick-up with no high aspirations of seeing our suitcases, wait at the baggage carousel and we became the people that I never wanted to be, those sad faces that realize that the clothes that they so carefully picked out and packed are somewhere else in the country...the worst part?...still in these shoes! We get our shuttle to our hotel room, the driver says "no luggage?" the doorman says "No luggage?" the front desk person, "no luggage? NO!!!! NO LUGGAGE!!!!

We get showers, put on the same clothes, I find a compact and some lip gloss in my purse, freshen up and walk, yes WALK! Still in those shoes, in the rain, to this restaurant where we had a fantastic meal of crawfish, alligator, catfish, and lumpmeat crabcakes and some great music! It was a really fun, relaxing place, just what we needed, we really had not had a meal all day. I passed out at around 9...really I think I went into a coma. At some point, I thought I heard John say that our suitcases were there and woke up later and wondered if I did or if I dreamed it.

When I got up this morning, there was my suitcase!!! Never have I been so happy to see comfortable shoes!