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Note: Although this is obviously written later, I’m putting it on the corresponding days for my own memory :)
So if you’ve been living under a rock, and haven’t heard, the Crimson Tide is now the 2010 National Champions (technically 2009, but that’s a whole other debate ;)). Anyway, I could not be more proud to be a 2-time alumni, current student, and a recruiting hostess for the football program. I cannot tell you how much it has meant to me to see these boys go from high school athletes to National Champions. I love them all dearly and am so proud of all they have accomplished! :)
Anyway, Alex and I got the opportunity to go watch them play. I couldn’t really afford the trip, but since this was my last year to recruit and would be the last time I’d get to watch my first set of recruits (the current seniors), my parents decided it would be part of my Christmas.
Anyway, on to our journey to California! (It is a little long, but I have to write down all the little details while I still remember them! :))
I stayed up late the evening before packing my bags, complaining about all the things I needed, but forgot in Tuscaloosa, and taking care of some last minute details (getting yoga pants hemmed, travel bottles for my cosmetics, printing off important info, etc.). Although I had planned to go to bed much earlier, I ended up working on everything until about midnight. Since we had planned to leave my house at 3 to get to the airport by 4, I figured getting a couple of hours of sleep would be worse than no sleep at all (something I learned during my college years: If I can’t get at least 5 hours of sleep, I’m completely useless and horrible to be around and better off staying up all night!) so I fought to stay awake those two hours before it was time to get ready. Before I knew it, it was time to hit the road!
And the adventure begin…(and I do mean adventure! Besides the fact that we won, this trip was not too great. Don’t worry, I’ll let you in on all the juicy details though! :))
We got to the airport really early because the drive went much quicker than expected (I’m talking we got there by 3:30) Want proof?
When we got there, we headed to the United counter, the airline we thought we flying with. Of course, their machines said they wouldn’t start serving customers until 4:30. We watched as every other airline started checking in people early and as for us, we waited.
We were happy that were first in line and had already struck up conversations with the numerous Bama fans around the airport. Finally, right at 4:30, the lady showed up, started turning everything on and we showed as much excitement as we could at 4:30 in the morning ;)
When she is finally ready for us (approximately 4:45), we give her our names and she goes “Sorry, you’re not on this airline”. I looked down at the itinerary I had in my hand (yes, I had a whole folder for the trip and yes Alex made so much fun of me and my twelve page itinerary I created ;)) that was printed from the United Airlines website and yep, it had United on it. Normally, I am a push over when it comes to this kind of stuff and don’t bother asking questions, but this time I was curious and not the happiest camper, so I asked. Apparently because the first leg of our trip was operated by US Airways through United, we had to go check in at the US Airways counter first.
Needless to say, we were not happy, but we made our way over to the US Airways counter which by this point has been open for almost an hour and has a line to the door. I seriously almost pitched a hissy fit in the middle of the airport…being tired, hungry, not feeling well, and irritated are not good things for this normally happy girl. We did run into some of my friends while standing in line so that made the wait a little easier. When we finally got up to the counter, this very mean lady was ushering us to one of the machines, although we were wanting to get a live person instead, and hastily punched in our information and handed us all the printouts and all but shoved us out the way. I checked my bag and we headed upstairs to grab some food and wait for our 6:00 am flight.
We enjoyed a great breakfast and although we were exhausted, it was nice to spend some time together since we hadn’t really had much time just us since I left Tuscaloosa before Christmas.
Before we knew it, it was time to board our flight for Charlotte. As Alex pulled out his boarding pass, he turned to me and said “Um, did you get more than one boarding pass” and I was like “Um no, but we should have more than one right?” and he replied “Yep, crap”. Well, this set me into an immediate panic and I was ready to go interrupt the boarding process to ask about it. Alex was all but holding me back to keep me from running up there, but as soon as she finished, I rushed up to her station. We asked her about it and she said rudely “You probably just left the rest of them in the machine”. I replied not so nicely (remember I’m tired and cranky and now panicked) “WE did not leave anything in the machine, one of the ladies down there did everything for us and handed us everything, so this is NOT our fault.” When she finally checked the system, after calling the final boarding call several times, she said “Um, apparently you’re flying United the rest of the way so you’ll have to check in with them when you get to Charlotte. You should have just checked in with United downstairs.” I seriously just about went off, but I didn’t and we hopped on the plane for our hour flight to Charlotte.
As soon as we got on and got all settled in, we started planning out how we were going to do everything. We only had about an hour layover and we were late taking off from Huntsville because of they had to put the deicer so I was sick the entire flight worrying about it. Any other occasion, I wouldn’t have cared but flights were so hard to find to start with, I knew we couldn’t just reschedule if we missed it. To make matters worse, right before we landed, I asked Alex “Do you think they tagged my luggage to go all the way to LAX?” and he replied “We’ll ask, but I’m sure we’re fine” Great…something else to worry about!
As soon as the flight landed, we quickly hopped off the plan and started heading to the area where she told us. Let me give you a visual of why I was worried about time.
Map of the Charlotte airport (Can you tell I’m a teacher…I like using visuals ;))
Anyway, we landed in Concourse E which you will see on the top right and we had to check in again at Concourse A on the far left. Yeah, we pretty much sprinted through the airport.
When we finally arrived at the check in counter, extremely out of breath I might add, the guy gladly helped us and let us know that this should have been caught by the employees at the Huntsville airport, so we were definitely not at fault. He gave us our boarding passes and I urged Alex to ask him about my luggage. He looked it up and my biggest fears were confirmed: my luggage was on its way to baggage claim in the Charlotte airport. I thought I was going to be sick because this meant we would have to go back out through security, get my luggage, pay another 20 dollars, go back through security and hop on our flight all in about 30 minutes.
We asked him if there was another option and he mentioned the problem to the lady next to him. She suggested he call down to the people over the baggage and have them pull it off baggage claim and retag it for LAX. They were however worried because we flew US Airways to Charlotte, but were flying United the rest of the way, and sometimes dealing with multiple airlines was complicated. Thankfully when they did call down, the guy that was over the baggage actually covered both airlines and since it was the HSV airport’s fault, he said he’d take care of it. Sure enough, the people out the counter paged him a little while later, and he let us know that he personally got my baggage off the belt, and retagged it for LAX. I was so thankful and probably thanked them a million times!
We breathed a huge sigh of relief and hopped on the plane for Washington, D.C.!
Smiles of relief on the plane headed for D.C.! Check out the Bama guy behind us! :)
Enjoying the extra legroom thanks to Alex’s mom! :)
This was another short flight, but we were actually able to enjoy it because we got all of our problems worked out and it seemed to be smooth flying from here on out! :) The pilot took a shortcut, not sure how but he did, and we ended up landing earlier than expected in D.C. The ground was beautiful as we were descending because it was covered with snow!
We had another hour layover in D.C. and we had mixed emotions about boarding the flight to LAX. We were excited because it was the last leg of the trip, but dreading it because it was also the longest and we were already so tired!
We were a little late in boarding because apparently they had overbooked our flight.
Thankfully Alex’s mom upgraded us so we were guaranteed seats (although not next to each other, but I’ll get to that in a minute) because when she booked our flights, it didn’t assign us seat numbers. When we called about it, they told us that they would assign us seats on the day of the flight. Luckily, his mom went ahead and upgraded us to the economy class (i.e. extra leg room) just so we’d be assigned seats. Good thing too because with this flight being overbooked, we would have had to rely on someone to give up their seats for us. As much as I would have loved to have been nice a give up my seat, I had too much invested too much to not get to California! Thankfully we had seats so we happily boarded the plane. Unfortunately our seats were not next to each other, but a sweet college football player, switched seats with me so we could sit together (he’s behind me in the picture below!) It worked out because my original seat was a little better (you could see out the window), and we were happy to sit together!
A little ways into our flight!
If you notice, we had already begun stripping layers because although we were leaving ice and snow in DC, it was like 78 degrees in California!
We hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast (we had planned to eat in Charlotte, but we were a little occupied ;)), so we were starving. We both decided on little snack boxes: Alex got the meat and cheese box, and I got the Luxe box you see below.
Let me tell you, mine was AMAZING!! It had hummus, parmesan and peppercorn cheese spread, fancy butter crackers, olives, multigrain tortilla chips and a dark chocolate covered pretzel that was to die for! :) Alex was a little jealous, but I was sweet and shared everything!
We watched a cute movie and tried to rest some, but all day traveling is exhausting. Near the end of the flight, this is what we looked like
Anyway, we were extremely happy when we landed in LA! The weather was gorgeous and I wish I had taken more pictures, but we were so glad to be off the plane we were ready to head to the hotel!
Our hotel was beautiful by the way and right next to the airport (only a block away, but we were lazy and rode the shuttle anyway!)
We got checked in and took the bags upstairs and headed out to grab some food. This is where we ended up…
Sad huh? We were starving and we didn’t necessarily want to spend a lot or get dressed up so this was one of our only options. I will say, it was worth it though because we were beyond starved at that point!
Our plan was to take a little nap, and then we’d meet up with some friends, grab a nice dinner and then go out for the evening. I normally cannot take naps, but I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow and was out until 10ish when Alex woke me up to ask me if I wanted to get ready and go out. I felt like I had been ran over by a train (and probably looked that way too…poor Alex haha) so I opted to let him go and stay in the bed. I don’t remember anything else until he sends me a message around 1ish telling me he was on his way back and vaguely remember him waking me up to tell me he was back somewhere around 2. Then, I was out like a light again until 6:00 am the next morning when we had to get ready for GAME DAY!
Next up, our journey to the Rose Bowl!
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