On the road again

BobG

I'm off on another road trip, this time to Wisconsin for a family reunion. Should be fun. All of my brothers and sisters are so scattered about the country that we rarely see each other.

Would have been cooler if my daughter and her son could have made it, but we ran into two of the most customer abusive institutions out there: colleges and airlines.

She has a professor who has a policy of announcing the test date the week of the test and no make-ups; not even the day before the test; not even during posted admin hours. That means my daughter misses her scheduled flight.

That means $950 to change her reservation to a flight later that evening, but she can't get a seat assignment until she checks in. A quick check on the internet reveals the reason. There are no available seats left on the second leg, which means she's actually flying stand-by on an overbooked flight, hoping someone cancels (on-line, the chart shows 3 seats available with two adjacent, but she still can't get a confirmed seat, which leaves me suspicious about whether she even gets on the first flight). I already bet $600 on a non-refundable ticket. I'm not betting another $950 to give her a chance of spending the night in the Minneapolis Airport. That always ticks me off that they never come out and tell you ahead of time that the flight is already full and that the only way you're getting on is if someone cancels - they'd never fill the empty seats for cancelled passengers if they did that.

hypatia

Hope you have a safe and fun trip!

angel 42

good luck

Astronuc

Have a safe and pleasant trip.

I'll be doing something similar at Thanksgiving with my family.

BobG

What a great trip. The anniversary party for my parents was great, but the best part was getting all of us 'kids' in the same place for the first time in over 20 years.

My sister reminded us of the seven game we used to play in the car on trips to keep us occupied. The game where you go around the circle, each player naming the next number in succession, unless the number is a multiple of seven or has a seven in it, in which case the player claps instead of naming the number. So we played that game while sitting around the campfire drinking beer. It was pretty challenging for cousins and those marrying into the family. I'm surprised at how many people forgot even the first ten multiples, let alone the trouble they have once you get over 100.

We stayed in a big lodge on a lake in northern Wisconsin with around a dozen rooms, so we did the Walton thing at night, except instead of "Good Night, John Boy", it was "One" from one room, "Two" from the next room, "Three", "Four", "Five", "Six", Clap, "Eight", etc. It was flat out beautiful up there. It's been over 20 years since I've seen a real fall. There were some very pretty hikes and drives.

We also had Pirate Night and all dressed up as pirates. Everyone was very impressed with my pirate talk, thanks to all of the folks here at PF.

We also had a couple bald eagles visit us every morning. I finally got a picture where you could actually tell it was a bald eagle, but it was pretty tough to get a good picture when it always showed up so unexpectedly. Trying to shoot a picture through the pine trees was kind of a challenge, as well.

All in all, it was a great trip.

Moonbear

That sounds absolutely amazing! What fun! Do you have any 30-something, single, male relatives so I can marry into that family?

I've never heard of the seven game before, but that's a pretty cool sounding game (especially as a drinking game around a campfire ). It's amazing how sneaky our parents were at making us play games where we actually were learning things at the same time.

Evo

That sounds wonderful Bob! When are you going to post the eagle?

BobG

The eagle. I can only zoom in to 3.5X on my camera, but the pictures are 10.0 M pixels. I cropped it to zoom in as much as I could and still get a decent resolution.

The original image is below: