The Bargain Shopper Lady

Our flight to New England was from Dallas to Hartford. I am in charge of finding the best deal on the tickets for most trips and I enjoy hunting for them. With kids, we like to fly nonstop but that’s not always affordable. In this case, there was  an $800 per ticket American Airlines flight that was nonstop. I opted to get us $110 a flight on another airline and found the best deal on Orbitz. We knew we could only check four complimentary bags with the new check in rule, but we ended up having eight! (There were quite a few things that we didn’t get to pack on the truck that we needed.) Four bags would be free and four bags would cost $25 each to fly. We checked four in to the sky cap at the entry. Then we headed up to check in. We checked four more bags and apparently the sky cap gentleman did not mark that we had already checked four bags. So they were allowing us to check all eight bags for free, saving us $100!

What we didn’t know is that we were then headed in for a big adventure! We took off from the gate only to pull back and wait an hour for the maintenance man to work on the air conditioning. At this point it was getting extremely hot. Then we pulled off and one of the passengers was having trouble breathing and chest pain because it was so hot earlier. We had to pull back and get medical attention for him.

At this point, we had now been on the runway with TWO toddlers for a total of TWO hours and missed our connecting flight.  They made an announcement and they were going to provide a hotel stay for us all in North Carolina. I called my mom and she said ” Just stay cool and think of it as a fun unexpected vacation.” I took her advise and stayed as cool as possible while entertaining my children. However, we got off the plane in NC at midnight, we got our new boarding passes only to find that we had to race to the hotel and get five hours of sleep.

I was thinking of calling the airline to explain that you never wake a sleeping toddler and we would have to change our flight. We stuck with it, the boys did extremely well under the circumstances, and we made it to Hartford the next morning for Mother’s Day.

We are currently working on our  New England Cottage, which is absolutely beautiful. I am still in shock that God  gave us such a beautiful gift and that the seller took our offer. We have painted the house and I am working on a special faux painting kitchen project like this only in red. The buyer left us beautiful rustic laminate flooring that my husband is in the process of putting down for me. In fact, he found a treasure yesterday, while he was pulling up the carpet, part of the house has gorgeous oak flooring from the 1940’s. We may shine that part up if we can and put the laminate on the rest of the house. Yesterday we saw cute chipmunks that live in our stone wall and a deer about 50 yards from our house! I’ll post pictures soon!