Getting to EuroTrip

Time for some EuroTrip posts, starting at the beginning.

The night before we left (that is May 10) I finished up the packing as some wicked weather came through Austin. Since Austin never sees rain, Austinites freak out about it and stop everything they are doing to focus on it. Trying my best to fit into my adopted hometown, I started worrying about our flight's ability to leave the next day and decided to check the American Airlines site to figure out where flight delays were posted.

When I typed in our flight number, it pulled up as leaving at 11a...not 12:50p like my confirmation email read. Odd no? I called AA and low and behold, yup, the flight was leaving two hours earlier than originally planned. I ran into the bedroom and told my drugged-up-on-sleeping-meds husband of the change and he gave me a bleary eyed mumbling "huh?".

Cut to the next morning and we're driving in rush hour to Jack and Nancy's house to drop off Lexi and to have Jack take us to the airport. Even for rush hour in Westlake, traffic seems bad. We discover that the light two before theirs is on the blink. But no worries, we get to the house on time and leave right on time. Driving to the airport we see the traffic at that blinking light that we had just been sitting is is now extended all the way down 360, across MoPac and back to Highway 79. Literally miles of stopped cars. Guess we got through that just in time.

We get to Chicago just fine and board our plane no problemo. Once we are on board the captain comes on and tells us the fuel is unbalanced we're going to have a short delay while the crew siphons some off. About 10 minutes later the captain comes back on saying instead of siphoning the fuel, we're just going to burn it. So there we sat, on the runway at O'Hare, revving the engines and burning off a thousand pounds of fuel. My inner liberal was screaming.

New flight times, traffic jams and burning fuel later, we were in the air and on our way to Rome.