family, life 
No Comments Colorado!
On Friday, Ingrid and I are flying to Denver, to stay with my sister and for me to attend Educause, the big national conference for my field. The conference isn’t til 11/7, but we are going to be gone 11/2-11/10 so that we can get in some great Aunt Kate time, and see the sights. When I booked our flights, I opted for the earliest flight from Bangor with the quickest connection — if we make the connection (40 minutes in LaGuardia), we will be in Denver before 11 am MT. For the last few weeks I’ve been stressing about that connection, looking at historical gate assignments via flightstats.com, to see if they are in the same terminal (yes, usually, for the Friday pairing) but now that Sandy has hit, my concerns are all new.
This blog post from Jetblue is making me sweat, a little. I have some friends with friends in high places that think we’ll PROBABLY be okay for Friday, and the Delta update today seems to assure that, but still. That is a LOT of water. A LOT. And the friend of a friend connection said that the damage at LGA might actually be worse than expected so to just pay close attention to my airline’s updates. With that, I used Twitter to reach out to DeltaAssist to see if it would help (all involved) if I switched to the flight that connects through Detroit and gets in later. (Especially now that Kate has to work on Friday, that pre-11am arrival is sort of moot). But, since it’s not in the dates specified for free changes, they can’t do it. Which is kind of dumb — I’m just passing through, and I’d think there are people that NEED seats into and out of LGA more than I need to just pass through, but, ooohhhkay. I’ll just keep checking Delta’s alert page and try to get in touch if things start to look bad for Friday.
But even if we don’t get there on Friday, I had the epiphany today that the worst-case scenario is that we shift our travel dates. We aren’t rushing to meet a boat for a cruise, we won’t lose expensive nights at a resort, the worst-worst case is that we show up too late to go to a magic show Kate got us tickets for on Saturday night. I can adjust my dates because I am in a career and position where that would be fine, Ingrid’s already going to be out of school for a week anyway (and if we had to move it forward a day or two, she’d actually miss LESS school) and Kate’s life as a full time student means that we will still have tons of time with her and she’s not going to have to burn vacation days or something. My conference runs from 11/7-11/9, so I’d frontloaded our trip for the fun part, if it ends up that there is fun on either end — oh well.
I had a similar epiphany many years ago, when I was driving somewhere (I forget where) and realized that if I had a flat tire, I had the means to pay for a new tire. It wouldn’t be a devastating event. And if I had more than a flat tire, I had the good credit to pull through. That’s the thought I have today – but instead of credit, it’s about being in a career and job and place that shifting my days off won’t be a huge black mark on my record, or lost wages, or anything like that. So, I’m trying to NOT angst about the travel issues that lurk just beyond my sight (um, but I do have a saved search in twitter for LGA, so, yeah…) but think about all the fun we are going to have once we get there. I can’t wait to travel with Ingrid, who at 6.5 is so excited for so many things — the American Girl store, the science museum, seeing mountains and the zoo and most of ALL, Aunt Kate. (Ingrid is also wicked excited to have long stretches of time where we HAVE to play Uno, and where her sister won’t be sabotaging the game.)
So, whatever happens, happens, and it will be great to have this time with my daughter and my sister. Even if it’s not on the most exact schedule I’d planned months ago.