Family union – Journey

As mentioned in the previous post, I was looking forward to this family union since the time we had zeroed on the place – Florida. Naturally I was all excited when the travel Friday dawned. As usual I had postponed ironing and packing to the last day. Our flight was later in the evening (red eye flight) and so I was able to pack conveniently.
My sister and her husband came to our house on time as planned. We headed to the airport on the decided time. I prayed there would be no traffic jams, and luckily my prayers were answered and we were able to reach the airport sooner than expected, thanks to some fast driving by my husband. We reached the long term parking lot and were welcomed by “Parking Lot Full” board. As we decided to make a “U” and look for parking spaces in other lots, the security person said that we could park our cars in the short term parking itself at long terms rates. You see short term parking is right next to the airport terminal and my sister screamed “How lucky we are” in excitement. Her husband pointed out, don’t conclude so early …. Wait for us to park the car.
We were surprised to find the domestic parking lot so empty. We parked right across the elevator so we didn’t have to walk long with the luggage. When we entered the domestic departure terminal, there were boards of all the airlines except ours … we looked, looked and still looked and then we found … our Airlines (Airtrans) was in the International Terminal. So walked all the way upto the International Terminal. The Airport is really huge and walking from Domestic to International Terminal with a kid and luggage is just not easy. Finally after a little more searching we found our terminal. We checked in, managed a quick dinner and headed towards the gate. The flight was on schedule. We cursed the airline crew for allotting us seats way in the back and were trying to get comfortable in our seats. My little one was just not too happy to be restricted to her seat. Thankfully we had carried Barney DVDs and turned on the laptop. She got busy with that for a while before falling asleep. We were to change flight from Atlanta to Jacksonville. We reached Atlanta on time 5:00am local time (2:00am PST). The highlight of our wait time at the airport was the over excitement of my little one, news repeated atleast 5 times in the CNN channel and the bad rest rooms.
One of my cousins S and her family boarded the same flight as ours at Atlanta. We all flew together and reached our destination on time. Car rental was just a piece of cake. We had our breakfast after a long wait at Cracker Barrel. Our vacation home was tastefully decorated condo. The patio had a nice view of the ocean and the beach was 3 mins walk from the condo. It was a pecfect place for a family union and we were all set to spend the next 3 days together.
Our return journey was not really eventful. Only thing that will be etched in my mind about the return journey will be the restlessness of my little one in the flight. All our energy was burnt by the time we reached back home. Our mind was refreshed while we were physically very tired.

ps: Details of my vacation will be in the next post