Home!- We woke up feeling pretty confident about making it home, and so so ready to be in our own beds and wearing some different clothes… it was with surprise that we checked the news and found out of the snowstorms surrounding Seattle, but we were fairly certain that our plane would not be affected. We checked ourselves in and boarded the airplane early, as we were told that we were going to try to leave early and get ahead of the strong headwind. We sat for 20 minutes or so in the plane before one of the stewardesses came on to announce that the co-pilot had been stuck in the snow north of Seattle and was running late (foiled again!).. After another half an hour we finally scooted out of our stall and got on the way. By this time, though, we were an hour late and we started to get nervous about our 90 minute Anchorage connection.
Oh, and another thing to make this day interesting- because we were traveling on mileage tickets, we had booked ourselves on the milk run, which stopped in Juneau, Yakutat, Cordova, then Anchorage, so a flight that is usually 2 and a half hours now ballooned until 6 or so. And then the weather in each of the spots was iffy so we spent a lot of time de-icing and such. One thing we DID appreciate though, was the amazing scenery and the entertaining flight. It was refreshing to see people in Xtra Tuff boots and carharts, big crazy hats and with open, booming voices. It was amazing and familiar to land in airports that were seemingly in the middle of large snowy vacant expanses. Anyway, the most interesting and stressful part of the whole day was our Anchorage connection. Our flight was supposed to leave Anchorage at 3:15 and we arrived at 3:10. I looked out the window at the gate (next door) where we were supposed to go to, and the gate was empty! We figured we had a run in store for us, so we pleaded with people to let us by and when we made it off the plane started to run- down the steps, across the snowy runway, up some more steps. Panting, we ran through the door into the terminal, looked around us…… and saw loads of familiar Kodiak faces. We were greeted with, “About time you got here with our Kodiak plane!”
As we sheepishly tried to look discreet (and let our fellow Anchorage passengers file by behind us) we settled ourselves in for a little wait… In another half an hour we got back on the same plane (and same seats!) and made our way to Kodiak. When we were nearly there we realized that we hadn’t seen any sight of land at all and we thought- oh, no- we’re going to have to turn around and go back to Anchorage and sleep in our dirty clothes in a hotel… but we somehow found a little pocket sky without fog and dashed down through the hole, towards the sea, and back down onto our home, snowy, runway. The kids were giddy with excitement (as were we… we were excited to see the progress on our house remodel!) and we felt as happy to be home and we were to leave.
New Year's Eve with the Simplers- just as it should be. :-)
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