Whenever I go on a Stampin’ Up! related trip I make sure to bring a gift for my roommates. That is just one of the many fun things about these trips. This year I was a bit short on time due to a delay getting home from our trip to San Francisco so I went with something pretty last minute and simple for my convention roommates.
I decided to use the new Wood Mount Stamp cases – I bought full sized and half sized empty cases. I used the This & That Epic Day Designer Series paper for the covers – cut to size and insert inside the plastic cover. Then I filled the boxes – the large box was filled with snacks and the small box was filled with some little convention/workshop necessities – post it notes, paper clips, pencil, chap stick, tissues, etc. To finish the boxes I stamped and cut tags with the Chalk Talk stamp set and framelits and added some Chevron Ribbon to tie the tags too.
I also received cute gifts from my roommates – but I don’t have pictures of those to share yet – I’ll have to do that later.
I will start to share the story from our San Francisco trip.
I still haven’t shared this story on my blog – but I told a few other people this weekend and they all say it needs to be written down because they have never heard anything like it. So since it is long – I better break it up into parts.
Over 4th of July our family went to San Francisco to visit Kyle (he is working out there for the summer). We had a great time visiting and sight seeing – I’ll create some My Digital Studio Layouts to share about that trip later. Right now I was going to share about our adventure home. Everyone I’ve told has said to write this down and share because as the story went on and on it was just comical all the things that went wrong. So this is it because I just couldn’t make this stuff up and if you don’t care to read on then go ahead stop here.
First I’m going to back track to the day we arrived in San Francisco. As we came in to the airport first I said “I sure hope there is a runway under us because I sure do see a lot of water”. Then all of sudden we hit down on the runway – hard – hardest landing I have experienced. And so hard this happened –
The oxygen masks dropped out of one of the seats.
I’ve never had a landing so rough. So then a day or two later is when I read on Facebook about a plane crash at the San Francisco airport. Initially I wasn’t sure it was real but then quickly realized it was. And thoughts of our rough landing returned – along with the fact that we were in the back of the plane and I think we came in on that same runway. It really was too creepy. Such a terrible thing. But we had a few more days in the area before heading home. I just didn’t realize then how much that incident was going to impact our trip home. And really I think it impacted airports and people everywhere since two of the four runways at SFO were closed for a good week. I’m sure there are many other stories that people have of trying to return home or go somewhere during that time. In the big picture we made it home safe and sound eventually but during the journey I kept saying “you have got to be kidding me this can’t be real” and many times I really wanted to sit and cry and mostly I just wanted us all to be home and safe and secure.
So these are the thoughts that kept running through my head after we were all at home –
“You know you’re a mother when you ignore your fears, hold back your tears, power through your exhaustion, and overcome all the obstacles put in your way for the sake of your child.”
We were to fly home on Monday with a direct flight from San Francisco (SFO) to Atlanta (ATL) leaving around noon and home about 9 pm. On Sunday I received a phone call on my cell phone that said our flight had been cancelled. I think I listened to it 3 times expecting it to give me some instruction on what to do next – push 1 to talk to someone, call this number, do this or that – but nothing it just says your flight is cancelled. So now what was I supposed to do. Now normally I take my laptop on trips but this time I didn’t – so trying to look things up on my little cell phone was not fun. But I went to my Delta app and called the customer service number – the wait was over an hour so I opted for a call back instead of sitting on the line. They did call back and I explained that our flight was cancelled – honestly during this whole experience it seemed like some of the people I talked to didn’t have any idea that the plane had crashed – you would think working for the airline that would be something they would be aware of the moment it happened.
So we tried to figure out how to get home and since SFO was still cancelling flights and the runways were closed we thought it would be better to leave from another airport – options were San Jose and Oakland. We were closer to San Jose and that would be easier for Kyle to drop us off and return to work with out impacting his day too much. The airline rep would find something and then tell me what it was and then I’d say ok and then she say darn – it was gone already. Actually for the first part of the conversation she was talking to someone else – and was chewing gum – not at all a good customer service rep like our Stampin’ Up! ones are. So anyway every option she offered kept getting snatched by someone else before she could get it so it ended up that “the best she could do” was fly from San Jose to LAX to Cincinnati to Atlanta – eventually arriving home on Tuesday mid morning. UGH! Why did I pay extra for a direct flight??? So that is what she reserved for us and passed me off to a ticketing agent to get our actual tickets. Later I tried to go online to see if there were direct flights from San Jose to ATL – there is one leaving at around 11 pm and it was all sold out. And there were several leaving from LAX so we thought once we got to the airport we would try to talk to someone in person and try to get a more direct flight. The checked for us but all the flights were full and oversold due to the cancellations from San Francisco. So it was still our best option – plus the added problem is that there were 4 of us traveling which seemed to make it that much harder.
Ok that’s all the lead up to the story before we started the journey. I’ll continue next time so be sure to come back to hear what happened next.
Thanks for stopping by!
