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I Hate Traveling in December/100 Things I Want

Soooo, Happy New Year!

I decided that I didn't want to finish the 100 things I want blog...I think I was feeling materialistic and now I'm not. I just want to be happy. :)

Traveling in December. I don't like it, not one bit.
Here's how it went down.

First of all, Saturday was such a great day. I was sooooo relieved that finals were done and I did pretty well on all of my exams. I went to two weddings and spent the day doing random things around Salt Lake. It was a lot of fun. So after the weddings, I drove up to Farmington and stayed at my Uncle's house. I went to sleep way early (especially for a Saturday) and woke up the next morning ready to fly home.

The next morning, I get a call from Katie saying that some of the flights to Portland had been cancelled. However, we checked online and it looked alright, so we headed to the airport. I check in and everything seems fine. By the way, I am on crutches at this point. I go through security, which took awile because my brace needed to be wiped down for traces of bombs or something. I head to the gate and chill and then they get on the speaker and announce that my flight has been cancelled due to inclimate weather. I call my mom and she gets me on a flight for the next day. I was kind of bummed out, but I thought, "hey, its not a big deal." But then I thought about it and I realized that my uncle and his family had left to drive to Colorado after dropping me off at the airport. Again, I called my mom and she called her best friend from high school and got her to come pick me up and let me stay at her house in Salt Lake up by the zoo.
It was another relaxing, pretty chill, night. A lot of wii tennis, :). However, with my rescheduled flight, we had to leave on that Monday morning around 5:30 AM. So we checked again to make sure the flights were not cancelled before we left for the airport, but they looked alright. Again I checked in and went through security and got to the gate.

So it was getting close to departure time and we hadn't started boarding, so I was getting nervous. They changed the gate board time to a half hour delay. I was thinking "alright, its just a delay. That means we will be leaving." I was wrong. After about being delayed for about an hour, the unholy voice of the woman that announced my cancellation the day before rang out and announced that all the flights to Portland for the day were cancelled. Then she continued to explain that there were no flights available for the next few days. There were only 5 seats left on the Christmas morning flight. There was a rush of people to the customer service desk, like an insane rush. I just watched because I was on crutches and called my mom because she had changed my flight the day before. She apparently is very speedy because she got me one of those spots.

So now I was starting to realize that I needed a way to get somewhere other than the airport. I wasn't about to just chill there for a few days. I also was realizing that I had given my car keys (along with my house key) to my uncle and the keys were also making the drive to Colorado. Uh oh. I searched through my backpack and found a spare key and it was a big relief. Then I started calling people to see if someone could give me a ride to Farmington, or at least to Provo so I could just chill at my place. Thankfully, Maren called me back and she drove me to Farmington, so nice. So the weather in Farmington was getting a little choppy, but around Salt Lake it was just a little rain. However, once I got to around Thanksgiving Point, it was snowing really hard. I had to drive like 15MPH for a good chunk of the drive. I also was really paranoid about crashing. I was driving with my left foot too, which is kinda nerve racking, try it sometime.

I got home and contacted Jeff to get a key to the house. I was glad I had a Utah roommate. Basically, the whole time I was back in Provo I watched a lot of TV and did laundry. I went to Seven Pounds and Yes Man with Mairin and Abbey too. On Christmas Eve I went to the Rytting family party. It was really nice of them to invite me to that.

So Christmas came and I got like 3 hours of sleep. I had to repack my stuff and wake up and be ready by 5:30AM for a shuttle to the airport. I didn't want to worry about driving anywhere, so I got a shuttle. It was a weird experience. First of all, my driver looked exactly like Santa Claus. He was wearing the red hat too. Also, we drove all over Orem trying to find some people's house to pick them up too. I mean ALL OVER. I was way turned around and apparently so was the driver. Lastly, it was suuuuuper snowy at the point of the mountain again. It was really scary. I couldn't see 5 feet ahead of us. We could have been driving perpendicular to the actual road and I wouldn't know it until we hit the divider or went off the shoulder.

Ugh, so I get to the airport finally and I check in and go through security, AGAIN. However, we leave! I get to Portland after stopping in Boise and call my mom. She can't leave the house because we live on a hill and it is still way snowy because Oregon doesn't plow, so I just take a cab from PDX. The cab driver was pretty crabby, but I don't blame him because he was working on Christmas. The roads are totally fine until we get off the freeway and are like a mile from my house. I start to hear the snow/ice scraping against the bottom of the plymouth voyager taxi-van. Then we start slipping and sliding around a bit, but we eventually get to the bottom of my hill. He tries to go up it but makes very little progress. I tell him that I'll just get out there, so he leaves me there. I think it probably looked pretty funny to see me in the snow looking up at the omnimous hill on crutches with a piece of luggage to boot. I called my mom and she sent my brothers to get my bag and I crutched up the hill. My mom thought it was pretty funny looking and took pictures as I hobbled up the icy mess. I was finally home.