The rest of our trip was filled with many adventures. On Monday, we went to Tampa to visit the Children's Museum there which was fantastic. I am quite sure the kids could have stayed there all day. The pictures should speak for themselves. Noah got a special plumbing lesson from some of the museum staff who were orienting there that day. Other highlights of the trip included visiting the St. Pete Pier/aquarium, getting to be at the Dali museum on opening day (1/11/11 at 11am), going to the Children's museum in St. Pete, seeing Tangled at the movie theater, and playing mini golf. Most importantly we got to spend lots of time with Grampy Grampy and Grammy Grammy.
Our trip home was a bit less fun, and very typical of a "Smith Trip"... Gabe has never been on one of these trips I don't think. We were scheduled to fly back on Wednesday, arriving in Portland around 5pm. On Tuesday evening we discovered that our flight was cancelled and the next available was Thursday late evening. I had to be on call on Thursday starting at 2, so we began calling around. We were willing to fly into anywhere in New England. Finally, we decided on a flight into Boston early Thursday morning. When we woke up Wednesday morning I called the airline again just to make sure there was nothing else. They were terrific and booked us on a flight that morning getting us back to Portland earlier in the day than originally planned, we just had to go through Detroit. We were so excited and started packing right away and rushed to the airport.
The flight left on time and went smoothly. We had only 25 minutes to switch planes which started our adventure. If anyone has flown into the Detroit airport, you will appreciate this. Our plane flew into terminal A and we needed to get to terminal C... it is a long way... We were down to 20 minutes when we finally got off the plane, we quickly asked a Delta lady where our terminal was, she told us and we were off. I was carrying James and 3 bags, Gabe was carrying Noah and 3 bags... we took off running... this was by far the toughest feat of strength I have faced in a while. We arrived at the empty gate with 3 minutes to spare, just to discover that our flight was CANCELLED!! Why hadn't the lady told us that at the beginning?!?!?!? Ugh!
This was at 1:45pm... for the next 2.5 hours I stood in line trying to get another flight/place to stay/etc. Initially the best they could do would get us into Portland at 8pm on FRIDAY... that was 2 days away... what would we do with 2 kids in the Detroit airport for 2 days? My time was rewarded, eventually, by them "squeezing" us in (aka overbooking the flight, aka forcing some other poor people into involuntarily taking a bump) on a flight that arrived in Portland on Thursday night. We found a hotel and got some supper. We tried to take a positive approach- we thought we would have the whole day to explore Detroit, the Ford factory, maybe a children's museum... As it turns out it was 32 miles to either Ann Arbor or Detroit!! It would have cost us a small fortune in both cab fair and car rental. It was a mere 12 miles to the nearest movie theater or Walmart... again, not the kind of money we were willing to spend. So, instead we played at the hotel until they made us leave, then we played at the airport for 6 hours. The kids were absolutely fabulous through all of this! Thankfully everyone cooperated and we, eventually, got our flight to Portland- arriving home at 9:45pm (after our flight was delayed another 2 hours) to an unplowed driveway b/c we had forgotten to give the plow man our keys... an appropriate end to our vacation. The bottom picture really sums up how James (and all of us felt) after the ordeal:)
Separate funny aside (especially for the Smith members of our family)- We did also have a small laundry snafu, I had packed enough clothes for everyone for one night, but not two (no luggage or stroller if your flight is cancelled). It became apparent that I would have to do laundry after several thing happened, 1- Noah had several accidents and had run out of clean underwear (and did not like going commando), 2- James had also had accidents despite us pleading with him to decrease the number of dirty diapers d/t our limited supply, 3- the final straw was when James spilled his breakfast all over Gabe and himself. Amazingly the hotel did have a "guest laundry" which consisted of a coin op washer and dryer from the 50s, but still better than nothing.
Me to the hotel manager: "I need some quarters for the washer/dryer"
hotel manager: "No, use the Pepsi machine around the corner, it will give you quarters"
(I did this and didn't lose any money, thankfully)
Me: "Do you have any laundry detergent I can buy"
hotel manager: "no"
Me: "ummm, you don't have any?"
hotel manager: "no"
Me: "Is there anything else I could use?"
hotel manager: "I have shampoo"
So, I washed our clothes with the shampoo which worked surprisingly well. Gabe was forced to stay in the hotel room during the entire ordeal because his only pants were in the wash... I can laugh about it now. We were still short on diapers, but thankfully, with some patience, the Delta people did scrounge up 4 diapers for us when we arrived back at the airport. It will probably be a while before we fly during winter again!
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