I haven’t blogged in a while. I’ve taken a few short trips but haven’t had time to write about them. Things have been crazy since … Halloween? But now, finally, I’ve had a couple days of down time. Much needed days of down time. Andrew and I took a long weekend at Walt Disney World to run a 10k and then reward ourselves with two days at the parks. But first we had to get there.

The travel drama started Thursday, the day before our scheduled flight. We were supposed to fly out of Indianapolis at 6:15 am on Friday, February 25. There was a little snow forecast for Thursday, but not enough to prevent travel on Friday. Or so we thought. Instead, a little after noon on Thursday, Andrew received a text that our flight had been canceled. Canceled? I didn’t receive a text. And when he went to the website and I went to the app, both still listed our flight. Then two minutes later they didn’t. They instead showed a rescheduled flight for SATURDAY EVENING, after the 10k. Heck, no! He got on the phone and I got online to try to figure something out. There was an afternoon flight out of Cincinnati and another flight out of Midway that would both get us to Orlando Friday early evening. I was actually on a webinar during all this. On the phone, Andy had a 45-minute expected wait, and a work call in about 25 minutes. I exhausted all online options, then took over his phone to finish the wait for an agent.

I will say that the phone agent was really nice. But not all that helpful. I asked if they would pay for a one-way rental car for us to drive to Cincinnati so we could keep our return flight to Indy, but no dice. They don’t have to make any amends if a cancellation is ”weather-related,” so of course they don’t make any amends. But she did help me get our flights switched. We just had to drive to Cincinnati, lose most of an entire day at Disney, and drive home late at night at the end of the trip. (Just writing this makes me want to take a big sigh.)

Friday morning we got up at our normal weekday time, said goodbye to Ellie, dropped Madeline at school, and headed out for Cincinnati. The roads were fine, which made us even more frustrated that the flight was cancelled. But we stopped at a small town restaurant called Country Kitchen or Farmhouse Diner or something like that for eggs and biscuits & gravy. Trying out new restaurants always makes a drive more tolerable.

We got to the Cincinnati airport about three hours before our flight, which is about two hours earlier than we typically would. The parking garage was nearly full, and we had to park on the roof. When we got to the baggage check area, Andy received a text notification that our flight was delayed. We checked the board, and it the delay was only 10 minutes. Also, there is pretty much nothing interesting outside of security at the Cincinnati airport, so we went ahead and checked our bags and headed to the gate. The Cincinnati airport felt like a labyrinth, with a tunnel under the runway, giant escalators, and u-turns, but we found our gate and then walked around a bit to kill time and stretch our legs. We went to our gate to sit for a bit, and there we learned that our flight was delayed a little more. At that point we were really frustrated but couldn’t actually do anything. We ate lunch at a sit-down restaurant at the terminal to kill time, and eventually the plane arrived, even later than the stated late time.

The gate agent came over the PA and encouraged everyone to prepare to board quickly so they could get us out as soon as possible. The arriving folks deboarded, and then we just sat there in the terminal, and they didn’t start anyone boarding. For about 20 minutes, which made me worry. But then they let us board, and it was a relief. When we finished boarding we sat on the plane, not moving for about another 20 minutes, and I started worrying again. Finally the captain came on and said something they needed was missing but on the way, and I breathed a little easier. Then finally we took off! While we were in the air I watched In the Heights, the screen adaptation of Lin Manuel Miranda’s first Broadway musical. It was great, but the wifi cut out about fifteen minutes before we landed, ten minutes from the end of the movie! I wanted to see how that thing ended, but no luck. (Note: I have since watched the end of the movie, but it was much less fun watching it days later. Overall, though, I highly recommend In the Heights.)

We got through baggage claim pretty quickly and caught an Uber to our Disney World resort. Unfortunately, all the delays meant we hit Orlando during rush hour, and it was not a quick trip. This time, we were staying at the Caribbean Beach Resort, an intermediate-level resort. Normally at Disney we’d do the mobile check-in, but our awesome travel planner (Stephanie at Lost in Adventure Travel, who is not paying me to mention her) had left a box at the front desk for us, so we decided we’d just check in when we arrived. Unfortunately, we had to wait a long time in line for check-in. By the time we got our room and our lovely welcome package — cookies and brownies, yum! – we had only 30 minutes until our dinner reservation, and we still had to go to the RunDisney Expo and pick up our packets for the next morning.

We went to the restaurant, which was at our resort. I talked to the hostess, and she said we should be able to do the Expo pretty quickly and get back, and if we didn’t make our reservation she’d seat us on the walk-in list. We called an Uber to take us to the Expo, and even though it was only about a mile away, we had to wait over fifteen minutes for it to arrive, and it was a rough trip. And expensive. The driver knew how to get to the Wide World of Sports complex, but the entrance he expected to use was blocked, and he dropped us off at a weird spot.

From any drop off point, we had to walk nearly half a mile to the place for picking up our bibs, and then to get our free (and awesome) t-shirts we had to go into the Expo itself, which was a large room that required more walking. We got our things and hurried out, and when Andy checked his app, it was going to cost a ton to Uber back to the resort. We decided to wait for the free resort bus, which happily came quickly, but we were still nearly an hour late for our reservation. We had gotten of the bus at the first stop and had to walk across the lake/pond to get to the restaurant. As we were quickly crossing, I got a call from Ellie. She was encountering plumbing problems at home and needed help knowing what to do! That was pretty much the last straw for me. It had been a frustrating, stressful day, and I just wanted to have a nice dinner and go to sleep. Unfortunately, I snapped at Ellie because she was being loud and crass. Andy talked her through the issue, and we made it to the restaurant, Sebastian’s Bistro.

Because our string of not-so-great luck had to end, the restaurant was able to seat us immediately, even though we were an hour late for our reservation. Dinner was amazing! Because we were running the next day we drank only water, but the food – served family style – was all great. We had a really tasty salad, pull-apart rolls with mango butter and onion jam (all amazing!), pulled pork, flank steak, chicken, broccolini, cilantro rice with black beans, and curry vegetables. And for dessert, bread pudding. We left about a zillion times more relaxed than when we walked into the place. Also, during dinner, I texted an apology to Ellie, which she very much deserved.

We walked back to the room and finally unpacked. While we got things organized, we put our run items out so that we could easily access them the next morning. We set our alarms for 3 am and went to bed, ready for the next day’s 10k!