Tag: Travel

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“SURPRISE!!”

This past weekend we all went to my mom and stepdad’s house for a surprise 60th birthday party for my mom. She’s probably cringing right now after reading how I just revealed her age (hi, mom!), but I’m positive that as soon as you take 1 look at the pictures of her below, you will think I’m lying about her being 60 years old.

Things didn’t start off quite as planned, however, since this area of the country suffered a nasty winter storm Friday night complete with heavy snow, rush hour Chicago traffic, and 10 mph highway speeds. That is not an understatement. What is usually an hour and 45 minute trip took us 5 solid hours. 6 if you count the full hour it took R to get from his office, pick up D from daycare, then get down to pick me up at my office so we could finally hit the road that afternoon.

All of the guests were supposed to have congregated at their house by 6:45, as my mom, stepdad, and the couple with whom they were having dinner were planning on taking the train back to the suburbs from downtown Chicago and arriving home themselves by 7:15. Har! Yeah right. We didn’t get there until 9:00. And some people weren’t even able to come that night and had to miss the surprise and come down the next morning instead.

Fortunately they were a couple hours delayed themselves, and thanks to the horrendous traffic and some strategic texts from my sister, we were able to sneak in the door not 10 minutes before they walked in the house. Whew! The surprise was safe!

It was so much fun. I think the pictures speak for themselves…

Although he wanted none of the spotlight, we made it into a joint surprise birthday party for my mom and retirement party for my stepdad. Friday was his last day!

Please note that D assumed this position on my mom’s hip as soon as she walked in the door Friday night and remained perched there the entire weekend until we left very early Monday morning. I think she may even have snuck out of her crib during the nights to sleep there, too.

We were excited to get D on the toboggan on Saturday, but she wasn’t too thrilled with the snow. I refuse to believe that the fact she had gloves on her feet since I hadn’t taken her boots and her legs were wrapped in a blanket covered by a garbage bag to keep the snow out had anything to do with that… Ahem.

Many an hour has been spent at this table (and many a beer drunk, as you can see) playing board game after board game during family get-togethers. Can’t you just feel the concentration?

And it never fails – you try to get my sisters and I together for a picture and it usually ends up something like this…

Happy Birthday, Mom!! We love you more than words, and you will never look a day over 25!

 

 

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Thar she blows!

Winter in Hawaii is humpback whale season, as these giant mammals migrate from the gulf of Alaska to the warm shallow waters around the islands for breeding and birthing. On the Wednesday of our week in Maui, we all went on a whale watching cruise, which turned out to be incredible.

During the 2 hour cruise we saw no less than I’d say a dozen whales. Some were various groups/pairs we would see repeatedly, but the number of sightings was very impressive. I think I had only seen 1 whale before, on our honeymoon. That trip to Maui occurred during the end of April and beginning of May, which is pretty late to see even 1.

We weren’t sure how D was going to do on the boat, especially for such a long ride. There were some meltdowns, but fortunately they didn’t last the entire trip. I did take her below deck for awhile 1) to get her out of the sun even though she was slathered in sunscreen, 2) to spare the whale watchers’ ears up top, and 3) because I was feeling like crap myself.

I need to stop pretending I don’t get seasick on boats like this, because I obviously do. Put me on something fast and direct, not slow and bobbing. Yuck. Fortunately ginger ale helped.

But the results more than made up for the twinge of nausea and the toddler tantrums. Besides seeing the whales, some of which came up right next to the boat, they put a microphone underwater at one point and we could hear some of them “talking”. It was so cool.

Mother Nature truly is an amazing lady.

 

 

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A very Maui Christmas

I’m probably stating the obvious when I say our Hawaiian vacation was spectacular, but it was. 7 days and 7 nights in paradise? How could that not be magnificent?

Our home for the week - the Ritz-Carlton, Kapalua

We flew from Milwaukee to Denver on the night of Dec. 23, then hitched a direct ride from Denver to Maui on Dec. 24, arriving around 3:30 in their afternoon. We were terrified of how D might react to a 7ish hour flight, but amazingly she was a peach. She started throwing up at my sister and brother-in-law’s house in Denver that Friday night and proceeded to douse herself and her car seat on the way to the airport Christmas Eve morning, but why wouldn’t she? Just making sure we were paying attention and getting nervous about what was in store.

Really nervous.

Fortunately Karma must have decided to give me a break, because we saw nary a trace of vomit after that. Well, until we got the rental cars in Maui and D decided it was a good time to barf all over her car seat and my step-brother on the way to the hotel, then again shortly after arriving there. At least we made the entire flight puke and crying free, though, right? Right!

So who knows what was going on in that little stomach. A mild bug? A touch of altitude sickness? Much to my surprise that was the last we saw of the cookie tossing for the rest of the vacation, including the tail end we spent in Denver again. Thank GOD!

There is much too much to cram into 1 post to recap this holiday sojourn, so I’ll simply begin with Christmas Day itself. The weather was a little cloudy and rainy, but thankfully that cleared up after the first day or so and left us with blue skies and tanned hides.

We enjoyed a delicious brunch at the Ritz on Christmas afternoon, then watched the Packers beat the Bears in Green Bay. As you will recall, we are a family divided when it comes to NFL football, so R was a solitary happy camper after that game. Ah well. We were in Hawaii!

Ok maybe R wasn’t completely solitary in his happiness at the Packers’ win. At one point that afternoon D came out of Grandma and Grandpa’s room modeling this, an authentic signed Aaron Rodgers jersey. Daddy was elated!

Stay tuned for more of our Pacific adventures…

 

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Beware parking and Frontier

Hi guys! We’re back from vacation, and although I long achingly to be back in the Maui sun, it is nice to be done traveling. And it was funny – when we got home last night and walked in the house, it looked surprisingly bigger than I remembered. Odd, since we were only gone 10 days and our house is tiny.

I will have plenty of vaca recap posts complete with picture after picture after picture, but I need to get them all organized first. That in itself will take a few minutes, but I promise they will come.

First, though, I wanted to warn you about 2 things we encountered during this trip. One night last week we parked in a public lot during a dinner out in Lahaina, a little beach town on Maui, and our credit card number was ripped off by the outfit running the lot’s pay box. It was one of those lots where you park in a numbered space, then pay at the unmanned box/kiosk based on your space number. Well, instead of being charged the $5 for the night of parking, they tried to charge over $620 on our card online from Barcelona last weekend. Um, yeah right.

Fortunately our credit card company called to alert me to some possible fraudulent charges, and I promptly told them that no, that was not us trying to make those charges. What the f?! Thanks a lot, Tick Tock Ticket, or Tik Tok Ticket, however it was spelled. I couldn’t believe it. The other car in our party paid with cash for the parking, so we were the only lucky ones to get scammed. Jerks. Lesson? Pay with cash for little things, especially when you’re not dealing with an actual person for payment.

Second, Frontier Airlines officially lost my business yesterday. We had a 10:35 flight home from Denver to Milwaukee yesterday morning and were at the airport easily by 9. Plenty of time to check in and make our flight, right? Wrong! The check in line was wrapped all the way through the maze of guides and out into the middle of the ticketing area of the airport, and since D was traveling as a lap infant we weren’t able to check in online ahead of time to bypass the line. Well crap. We figured we’d have no issue, though, seeing as we were plenty early and things seemed to be moving fairly quickly.

However, when we finally made it up to the counter and tried to check our 3 small bags as we had on every other leg of this journey, the snotty Frontier agent refused to allow us to check in for our flight, saying we were within the 45 minute barrier when they close the flight. Um, what?!? You idiots made us wait in line for over an hour, with not one agent walking through notifying people that it was getting close to the cut-off time to check in for the earlier flights, like every other airline I’ve ever flown on does. You know what I’m talking about – the agent going through everyone in line asking if anyone’s on the next closest flight, and getting them up to the front to get checked in to make sure they’re on it. Apparently Frontier doesn’t believe in that system and would rather fly their planes half-empty instead.

So not only did she not allow us to check in for our morning flight, she wouldn’t even check availability on other airlines with similar or even close departure times. She dismissed that request with a quick, “No, there’s nothing else available.” Uh, I’m sure there is, but thanks anyway for taking those 4 extra seconds to check (turns out there were 2 other flights on different airlines with departure times close to ours). Nor would she take the time to see what our options were the following morning. Again, “No, nothing,” with an obvious lack of actually pulling anything up on her computer. So we were placed on standby for the 3:08 flight yesterday afternoon, with the chance of being continually rolled over on standby until the first available confirmed seats on the 8:51pm flight on January 4. What?! No.

Not only did we not want to spend 2 more days in Denver, but the Rose Bowl in which the Badgers were playing was on yesterday afternoon at 4pm CST! If we had to miss that because of Frontier’s beyond terrible ticketing agent, I was ready to throat punch someone. Ok, so we’re on standby, now what to do with our bags? One of Frontier’s saving graces has always been their policy of not charging you the extra $20 to check carry-on sized bags. Yeah, well, this girl obviously didn’t abide by that policy. She was going to charge us $60 for our 3 bags instead of the $20 we’d been charged by Frontier on our first flight to begin this vacation, since 2 of the suitcases were easily carry-on sized. Whatever. So we only checked 1 and the car seat through for free.

This is already making me mad again just thinking about, so I’ll try to make this long story short. After our disastrous encounter with the girl at the ticketing counter, we had to go through security 3 times since we forgot about things in our bags that were larger than the TSA approved sizes for liquids and gels. As we’d checked everything through the whole time up until that point, we hadn’t had to worry about that. Awesome. 1 time they made R pay to check his bag, but when I went back the 3rd time to check D’s, the woman was much more understanding and did not charge me to check the carry on. Um, how about some consistency, Frontier?

Thank god we were 2 of the 3 people who made it on that 3:08 flight on standby (D doesn’t count for a seat since she was a lap infant), and we made it home around 6:30 last night. Only 5 hours later than originally planned. At least Frontier does have the in-flight TVs so we could watch most of the Rose Bowl on the plane. We missed the very end on the drive home but tuned in on the radio, just in time to hear us lose. Ugh. Oh well, at least we were miserable at home instead of still stuck in Colorado.

So there you have it – beware of shady little unmanned parking boxes and Frontier Airlines’ ridiculously terrible customer service. You’d better believe I am filing a complaint on their website. We at least deserve our $20 back for having to pay to check R’s carry on, something for which we have never been charged until yesterday morning. What made me most irate about the whole fiasco was the ticketing agent’s attitude – she kept huffing and puffing and putting her head down on the counter in exasperation at how long the line was. Huh? That’s not our fault. Just do your job and get us on our flight! She obviously failed.

1 highlight of being stuck in the Denver airport for 5 extra hours yesterday? D was an absolute dream of a traveler, even taking an almost 2 hour nap while we waited.