They're Gone

Another crazy week and I just realized that there are some very important items that I have neglected to discuss. I will have to address those in another post however because this has been quite the eventful day and it will take me a while just to share it. 

Today Lisa and Alycia left for Canada. Kira and her boys are attending an SMA camp and any single mother with two little boys would need some help camping but with Evan she just needs a little bit more help. Justin has to work so Kira flew both Alycia and Kira up there to go camping with her and the boys. 

Last night and this morning were spent packing and getting ready for the trip so when we came home from church we had a couple of hours we could use to take care of some last minute things and then it would be off to Lindbergh Airport. Well no sooner had we walked into the house when Lisa got a phone call from Delta telling her that her flight from San Diego to Salt Lake City was delayed and so she would miss her connecting flight to Calgary. She had been rebooked on a flight that would leave tomorrow morning getting her into Calgary in the early after noon. 

That wasn't going to work because Kira was planning on leaving Calgary tomorrow morning so Lisa called Delta to see if other arrangements could be made. After an hour on the phone we had made no progress at all. I asked if we could fly out on other airlines but no luck.  I asked if we could connect through other cities like Vancouver or Seattle or Portland but no luck. I asked if there were any flights from airports in  the LA area like LAX, Long Beach, John Wayne or Ontario but no luck. Finally the stupid woman on the phone says. "Oh, I just found seats on an American flight, can you get to the airport by 1:30?" It was already after 1:00 and we don't live that close to the airport.  Why couldn't she have found that flight an hour earlier?

We finally realized that we were dealing with a moron so we piled into the van and headed down to the airport hoping for some better luck. We also figured that if a last minute flight did open up we wanted to at the airport so we could take advantage of it. Unfortunately there were just no more flight going out so Lisa and Alycia resolved themselves to the fact that they would be spending the night in SLC and getting late start from Calgary tomorrow. When they went to issue the tickets however we learned that the fool on the phone had confirmed Lisa on the flight tomorrow but not Alycia. That was especially frustrating because Lisa told her specifically on the phone that they were travelling together and she gave her Alycia's confirmation number and the woman had even asked how old Alycia was. Frustrating.

 The woman at the airport was far more competent that the one on the phone so grasping at straws I decided to ask her same questions that I'd asked on the phone. When I suggested that I could drive them up to the LA area she said, "Oh, we fly into John Wayne. In fact there is a flight leaving at 2:30. It was now 2:00. I could have screamed. If the fool on the phone could have seen that when I asked her we could have driven straight to Santa Ana and made the flight. As it turned out there were seats on a plane leaving at 4:37 that would get them to SLC in time to catch their original flight to Calgary. The problem was that it was already well after 2:00 and it was an hour and a half drive. I checked my trusty Android and it showed that the freeways were good and that it would take one hour and thirty nine minutes. We decided to risk it and off we were. Luckily the highways were good and we were at the gate about 5 minutes before they started boarding the flight. 

"Whew"

Every cloud has a silver lining and Ben and Sharley live in Orange County and so I called Ben to see if they were going to be home. Ben told me that dinner should be ready about the time I got there so off I went. Finally some good luck. It was good to see them and after some delicious enchilada's I gave them both a hug and came home. 

I'm starting to miss Lisa already and she hasn't been gone for more than six hours. This is going to be a long two weeks. 

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1 pound of thorium has the equivalent energy as 300 pounds of uranium or 3,500,000 pounds of coal. In addition, a thorium molten salt reactor is much safer than any uranium reactor and would never have melted down like the Fukishima reactor in Japan. The United States has enough thorium to supply our energy needs for centuries. 

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