Up at 5am, shower, last minute packing, 2 eggs, a 7am pickup and a quick trot off to SFO in Saturday morning traffic...that was the easy part.

Then...the "malfunction" occurred. Oh yeah - the words you really want to hear when you're sitting in a plane embarking on the first leg of a 2 leg 5 hour journey - "this is your captain speaking.....um.....we're having a bit of a problem with the landing gear".



Well, that was the end of those plane seats. We picked up our carry on baggage and headed out of the plane. Our SFO -> LAX leg had been canceled and we were now looking at unexpected trip to DFW. Ok - no big, our little family has encountered trials and tribs that have far exceeded a little canceled fight! After waiting in line for what seemed like ages to get our new boarding pass, we got on our new plane bound for Dallas Fort Worth.

After our plane landed in DFW, we had a few seconds to go 22 gates and board our next flight....but oh, our destination was so close, we could taste it. Nashville, TN awaited us. But the DFW control tower had other plans. Little did we know that we'd have front row seats for LOTS of other planes cutting in front of us in line to take off. Yes, for 45 minutes we sat on the little part of the run way that runs perpendicular to the runway itself while other planes passed by and cut in front of us to takeoff. What is up with that? Well, apparently the pilot didn't know either...he would come on the loudspeaker thingie and say, "this is your captain speaking.....um....it appears that flight control is going to have these couple of planes go ahead on in front of us - should be another 4 minutes, 5- minutes tops". And you really, really want to believe him - I mean, he is the pilot for pete's sake! But, he lies! Anyway - we did eventually take off...of course I had already read the "Sky Mall" magazine twice (oh wait, that doesn't count the 1 time I went through it waiting on our broken plane at SFO, sorry) so I wasn't sure what the next 1.75 hours would hold.

Yes, we did eventually land in Nashville....oh, the victory. It had been a long day and we were all very tired. Unfortunately, there was the little issue of the luggage. Hmmmm.... Where were our bags? American Airlines decided to give them a few more frequent flyer miles than they should have. Off to the baggage claim office to file our "delayed baggage" report along with all those other fellers that were re-routed. They did give us a cute little "sorry for the inconvenience" bag chocked full of mini-goodies like mini-toothbrush, mini-toothpaste, mini-shaver, mini-hairspray, mini-brush. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Abby's car seat was among the missing. Is it against the law in Tennessee to have a 4 year old child sans carseat?

I'm not complaining. Really. I'm not.

Our family was in amazing spirits even at that point in our journey...we can only attribute that to the grace of God. In fact, our precious little Avis rent-a-car gal Tammy complimented us on our great attitude and mentioned that it made her day. We were just happy to be in Tennessee, even if our underwear wasn't.

So, off to Crestwood Suites we went...Mom & Dad in the front seat and Abby in the back sitting on an old booster seat loaner from American Airlines that had seen better days (like, in the 90's). As Babe the pig would say, "LA LA LA".

We got to our cozy little room, brushed our teeth with our mini-toothbrushes and drifted off to sleep.

No wait - I forgot the part about where I drank a large diet coke before I went to sleep....so on the sentence above, insert "tossed and turned until 2 am," right after the bit about the "mini-toothbrushes".