Spiffing up and Cancelled Flight Mess

Since our little home base is in the middle of nowhere, we don’t  get a lot of visitors.   Sometimes that works and sometimes that doesn’t.  We like visitors and we especially like family visiting.  There are also some things we love about being in the state of Washington and playing around the “cabin”.  One is having a granddaughter, Sandi, helping us.     This time she called us and told us she’d be staying with us for a few days.  We were happy that she would be.  

We only got to spend a short few hours with our son and with our daughter. However, we did get to spend time with Sandi because she stayed with us.

Her first job was washing the deck – bye bye leaves.  Next she helped Papa break up the old gazebo so pieces would fit in black bags.  This summer we’ll be putting down new decking and another gazebo.  Of course, after tearing down the gazebo it was time for food and a fire.

Kitty is a feral cat we met a couple years ago.  She’s friendly and even allows us to pet and scratch her.  She’s been recently spayed and had shots.  One of her babies from two years ago hangs around.  I buy the cat food and they are usually well fed.  When we’re not there, they’re fed at the maintenance shed by staff. 

Even our neighborhood deer know when we’re back.  They stop by often to check out the deer feeder.

The drive to our “cabin” is one we often see cars in a ditch or worse yet, in an bad accident.  It’s a two-lane windy road.  This week there were two accidents we knew of.  One was this car that had trouble staying on the blacktop.  Then there was the one our grandson had.  He didn’t quite make a 90- degree turn on the road.  Needless to say, his perfect car isn’t so perfect any more.

On one of our trips to town we discovered a couple throw rugs at the Log Cabin Shop.  One had a cabin on it.  The other had fish.  We couldn't pass up either one. 

Terry found something he had been looking for too.  He found new Bose headphones he just had to have.  His other Bose headphones had seen their better day.

Saturday we had the semi-annual board meeting for the 1500 lot owners.  It was interesting and it got pretty hot at times.  The manager had recently quit.  One reason may have been because he knew a forensic audit was just around the corner.  Did he have a hand in the till?  Perhaps.   I’m sure we’re not finished with issues here.  I’m also sure it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Tammi’s the board secretary.  Here she’s voicing an opinion.

Normally the plan after most of these semi-annual and annual meeting is to meet at the Board President’s place.  It’s just a small group but it works for folks to de-stress.

This is the view from his deck.  Gorgeous!

We had planned on returning to our motorhome Tuesday or Wednesday.  Sunday evening I checked flights.  EGADS!!  Flights were bad most of the week.  The best option was a flight out of Portland Monday morning.  It was open and there were quite a few empty seats.  We went into a panic packing, cleaning and trying to get ourselves ready to go.  

The only good thing was that we also knew that Tammi had a flight out early Monday morning too so we could hitch a ride.  After moving our Jeep into the storage lot, that’s just what we did.  We were sure it would be an excellent day for flights.  We were wrong.  It was an awful day.  

To begin with our flight was cancelled for mechanical reasons -- a broken door.   That was the only non-stop flight to Dallas with a good connection  to Shreveport.   What a mess!  The original flight from Portland was first delayed 6 hours, then 12 hours, then 14 hours and finally 23 hours.  Obviously, we had no desire to spend that long at the Portland  airport – no desire at all.

Yes!  They still feed you in first class.

We booked a flight on Alaska Airlines to Seattle but 4 separate gate agents didn’t know how to process it.  The last one ended up moving the ticket from an electronic ticket to a printed ticket.  Oh… oh… it took almost an hour to work through that and we missed the two flights out of Portland that had a good connection in Seattle. 

Some airports allow you to stay behind security overnight and some don’t.  Our goal was to get out of Portland and spend the night in a larger airport instead of this one.  We booked a flight to Charlotte, NC thinking we could sleep on the airplane.  That was before we found an open flight to Chicago with a late connection to Dallas.  The best thing about it is we had first class tickets then to Chicago and first class tickets on the 10 PM flight to Dallas. We’re sitting in Dallas now.  It’s cold in the airport.  We arrived about 1:00 AM.  Needless to say, it's been a night with very little sleep.

In a few more hours we hope to be on our way to Shreveport. We’ve had creative flights before but nothing like this where we’ve been listed on 9 different flights in one day.    We’re hoping the nightmare is over soon.  I think Murphy must have found us.

Leaving Portland the snow covered mountains were beautiful.  Mount St. Helens was obvious with its flat top.

Check this drone out.  It includes a high definition camera.  It’s  brand new to the market at Brookstone.

‘Tis life on the road and in the air.