Explore the World – my oddinary

So let me start this post and section off by saying it all started with key chains from every state that my mom and I visited…my husband and I decided to carry on the tradition, but with shot glasses. So far we have 15…for those of you who do not know our full story…we have only been together since January 1st of 2019. Lots of traveling!

Looking back at this experience, we can laugh, but in the moment it was one of those things where we knew the over all experience would make our relationship much stronger and we could get through anything!

We had just bought a campsite in Gold Bar to move the RV from Peoria Illinois to Gold Bar, Washington so we could have an escape and it would be in the same state we live instead of storage sitting and not being used. Our plan was to drive from Peoria, IL to Washington over Memorial Day weekend (2019) since it is quite a long drive and we didn’t want to use vacation time away from work. So the plan was to check on the RV and truck the weekend of April 12th-14th and get everything ready for the 2,000 mile drive that would take place just a little over a month later.

We flew in and started right to work on getting everything ready, new battery in the truck, pulled the RV out, checked all the tires, generator, etc. it had sat thru a long cold (very cold winter) I won’t get into all of the nitty gritty, but basically one of the water lines on the exterior froze and broke, the generator was dead from not being run and wouldn’t work so we had to get a generator to start the generator so we could hook it up to the truck, it was a rough weekend with lots to get done to say the least. So as the weekend was coming to an end we rushed to get everything that we could done so it was an easy departure the next time we flew out to drive it back home. Well Sunday morning came around and our flight was scheduled in the afternoon, we woke up and there was snow….and it was coming down hard and quick!

My husband kept checking our flight status, everything was on time the snow wasn’t sticking to the runway and we were good. As we drove from Peoria to Chicago to the airport it just kept snowing, almost like a blizzard in some parts. Something I had never seen before! We dropped off our rental car and went into the airport to check in, there was a HUGE line of people so we were confused when the website and app kept saying our flight was on time and the snow wasn’t sticking to the ground. When we tried to check in at the kiosk, it was it was unable to find out flight…then we looked up at the monitors and our flight was cancelled. Let me also add in here that my husband had a HUGE meeting that Monday he couldn’t miss so we had to get home. So we got in line….1 hour….2 hours…2.5 hours…finally we spoke with someone. All flights were cancelled, not a single one was flying out. The earliest flight out was on Thursday….yes that is right THURSDAY…it was Sunday. So we started freaking out, both of us had to work on Monday and this was not going to work. So we started looking at other airports with flights to Seattle…well we found one…out of Omaha…yes you are reading that right…Omaha Nebraska…we were in Chicago, Illinois. We walked out of the airport went back to the car rentals, grabbed a car and started driving. By this time it was about 5pm we had about an 8 hour drive and a flight to catch at 5am from Omaha to Colorado, then Colorado to Paine Field (our car was parked at Sea-Tac airport).

From Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska we hit them all and made sure to get shot glasses at each state. We also stopped at the biggest truck stop off of I-80 I mean we had to! We made our flight and were beyond exhausted. Next stop Colorado…another shot glass to add! Then finally made our way to Paine Field and called an Uber to drive us back to our condo (luckily at the time we were living in Mill Creek/South Everett, so we were only a 15 minute drive from the airport). Oh what an adventure…on a side note, we won’t be flying Southwest anytime soon!