Colorado Trip - Day 1

Our entire family flew to Colorado on Friday to visit Clankeeper's family last week. We had planned to visit this fall but Clankeeper's mom was diagnosed with lung cancer so we moved the trip up a bit.

The week before the trip Merry was overcome by spring fever and made an exuberant leap on a flight of stairs and hurt her leg. Yes, the one that was shattered in her car accident. She couldn't walk on it for 5 days, using crutches to get around, but X-rays showed nothing was broken and by the time our trip began, she had just a milk limp.

The day we were leaving for the airport, we were all in the van ready to go when Aragorn remembered something and flew into the house to get it. He severely sprained his ankle going down the stairs but being the strong and silent type, he didn't mention it to us when he came back out. We left for the airport and it wasn't until we were about to go through security that we noticed he was feeling faint from walking on his hurt ankle. He had to sit and rest it for a bit but we all made it to the gate ready to leave with plenty of time to spare.

There were severe thunderstorms and tornado warnings in Colorado on Friday and so our plane was late arriving to pick us up. We ended up leaving the airport over an hour and a half late. The crew was quite funny and gave us the most hilarious safety speech we have ever experience on a plane. "If the cabin looses pressure, oxygen masks will come down. Stop screaming and put on your mask and then help those next to you who are children or are acting like children." All of their funny comments really made the beginning of the flight nice. Little did we know what we were in for later...

The trip was going well until we got near Denver where there was quite a bit of turbulence and we all were tired and not feeling too well. The pilot told us that in his 30 years of flying, he had never seen thunderstorms quite like these storms. Usually thunderstorms come and go in Denver, but these ones were stubborn and stuck around and stayed. They put us in a holding pattern and told us that we had plenty of gas and they would let us know if we had to divert to somewhere else. I had the feeling that some Frontier Airline pencil pushers were debating the risk of our plane landing versus the cost of housing and feeding 150 people who would be diverted to another city if they didn't land in Denver. Ultimately they decided to let us land in Denver. That last 30 minutes were pretty rough, especially since it was almost 1 am and we were all stressed to the max. Martin, The Queen, and Emma Darcy were all feeling sick but thankfully no one threw up. Even after the plane landed it was tossed back and forth on the runway! It was something we have never experienced before and quite scary. We could hear hail hitting the outside of the plane while we taxied to the gate. What a flight!

We got our luggage and tried to locate someone to help us with our rental cars. I had called to ask what procedure we should follow but obviously the directions given to me applied during normal working hours, not at 1:30 in the morning when no employees were to be seen. It was pouring rain but the cool fresh air revived us all, despite the stress the parents were feeling. We finally found a very helpful employee and we ended up being given mini-vans, even though we only reserved full-sized cars (they were parked a lot closer to the covered sidewalk and we think the employee didn't want to go out in the rain any further than he had to!). The parking lot was flooding from the downpour and we all had to walk through about 4 inches of water to get into the cars. We drove down the road to our very nice hotel room where we all fit into a 2 bedroom suite and fell exhausted into bed, thankful to be safe and in a warm, dry bed.

End of day 1