Donna and I jetted to the Nation’s Capital this weekend to see Sally, Donna’s longtime friend and globetrotting State Department minion. As a bonus, Sally’s mom was visiting her there too and they were both staying with sister/daughter Susie at her home in Chevy Chase, MD, so we got two visits for the price of one.
The trip started out inauspiciously with us showing up at the Augusta airport at what we thought was an hour early, but turned out to be a minute to late. We had misread our eTicket and thought that the Atlanta arrival time was our Augusta departure time. Fortunately it was early on a week day, so there was an actual flight leaving at the time we thought, and there was enough room on it for us. Unfortunately that chopped most of our Atlanta layover time away. Naturally the flight we did get on was delayed on takeoff, thereby leaving us just enough time to race from one gate to the next to make the flight to Dulles. Little did we know this was an omen of how the whole trip would seem to go.
Here are a couple of low lights: 1) On Saturday we had arranged to meet a cousin of Donna’s who lives in Richmond at a half way point between there and DC. She picked out a regional breakfast chain called Aunt Sarah’s that was an easy off exit on I-95 in Fredricksburg, VA. We got there first and when we pulled into the lot we knew we were in trouble, it was empty, so too was the building. This particular Aunt Sarah’s had shutdown. We ended up at a Bob Evans on the other side of the Interstate. 2) I failed to print out the directions to our hotel near the airport on Saturday night. This resulted in a lot of driving and looking with no luck. Finally I admitted defeat and pulled into a sister hotel in the chain that I did see and asked for directions. The helpful clerk wrote the directions and off we went. We ran into trouble after the second line because we never did find the road she said to take a left on. Several miles later I called the number for the hotel we were to stay at and got directions. Turns out it was almost back where the other hotel was, but by now it was closer just to finish up my 25 mile loop around Dulles International Airport than backtrack.
On the way home today when we left DC the flight was full. so they asked if people might go ahead and check some of their carry ons for free to make sure there was enough overhead bin room for every one. I talked Donna into swapping a few things around and we did just that. Wouldn’t you know it, but that bag didn’t show when we landed in Augusta. When the gate agent filled out the form she got the flight number correct, but instead of writing Augusta’s airport code of AGS, she wrote down AUS, meaning the bag made a trip to Austin, TX. As of now it’s current arrival time in Augusta is 10:42PM tonight, we should get it sometime tomorrow.
Maybe tomorrow, I’ll write about some of the highlights.
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