Flying to Los Angeles

Our flight out to LA was long. Five straight, non-stop hours with three children who refused to just go to sleep already! I don’t know how it happened, but our carefully laid out plans landed us at the departure gate just 5 minutes before boarding began. We were more than a little stressed and Bip was quite put out with me for some reason related to me making him ride in the stroller and not letting him wander aimlessly and so he wanted only Daddy. That meant I got to sit with Frick and Frack Boo and Pumpkin Girl for the entire trip. They were fairly easy to travel with, especially after letting them watch movies on the DVD player. Except for Boo who guzzled his soda after I told him not to and had to go to the bathroom twice in 20 minutes. And then proceeded to keep a running dialog with himself for the entire last hour of the flight while Pumpkin Girl and I pointedly ignored him.

Meanwhile Philip kept the 2 year old entertained. Ha!

So we arrived at LAX, no worse for the wear and collected our luggage. After the baggage claim area cleared of mostly everyone, we accepted the fact that our car seat and booster seats were not arriving. I knew they wouldn’t. Back in DC when we handed over our car seats to be checked on to the plane, we were directed to a different counter. Our seats were bagged and tagged and then we were instructed to leave them “over there.” “Over there” turned out to be a spot on the floor next to the roped off queue. Ok then. We left our seats “over there” and hoped for the best. We did hear the ticketing person call for a car seat pick up, but we didn’t have a whole lot of warm fuzzies over this.

So of course the seats didn’t arrive and there we were with no ability to go anywhere without the car seats. Philip went off to file a claim and demand that someone go out to the local StuffMart for appropriate seats. The airlines however, lose carseats frequently enough to actually have loaner seats available. So, 2 hours after landing, loaner seats in hand, and we set out to find my parents’ car they had left for us in the parking lot.

Don’t ask.

Tired and crabby and very much on East Coast time, we wrangled the car seats and luggage into my parents’ car. We plugged in our GPS and while it tried to calculate the route from our last known location in DC to our hotel in LA, I told Philip that we needed to take the 405 S to the 110 S. I don’t know why, perhaps because it felt like 10 PM to us (see “East Coast time” above), but he kept asking me which freeway we were taking. I kept telling him the 405. South. to the 110. South. Very patiently. Through gritted teeth. He offered to let me drive. In my head, I offered to let him live.

Meanwhile, those people who insisted on coming with us and needing special seats because they are so small were sitting in the back seat, not going to sleep already and making comments about which freeway we needed to be taking. The front seat however, was quite silent.

So the 405 S led us to the 101 S and after turning the wrong direction off the freeway, we found our hotel.

All went exceedingly smooth for the rest of the trip. No, really, it did.