a really bad travel day

Now that we made it home, I can finally blog the hellacious trip we

had to DC in the first place.  I didn’t want to relive it at first and then it felt like I would jinx the trip home, so I’ve just avoided it.  But, here it is.  You think that you have done your planning well when you make a trip like this.  We leave GR at at 5:30pm, so no rush hour traffic to worry about, no staying in a hotel the night before, a direct flight that only lasts an hour and a half.  It’s going to be cake.  We take the MARC train to DC from the train station at BWI and the 

metro to our hotel.  We should be in and crashing by 9pm at the latest.  But, you don’t know what the gods have in store for you with plane travel these days.  John asks at the gate if the plane we’re flying is a Maxx 8 and it’s not….that’s

good because at this time, America hadn’t grounded them, Southwest flies them and we’re on Southwest to Baltimore.  We get on without problem and then we sit, we sit and we sit.  They tell us that they need hydraulic fluid, but there are a lot of ground crew around us.  A lot.  We are surrounded by yellow vests and little tugs that do things at the airport.  They don’t give us a lot more information and we keep waiting, but this is a flight out

 of GR going to the hub in Baltimore.  We are probably the only people on the plane who aren’t making a connection.  So, after an hour, several people get off the plane and then their luggage has to be taken off, etc, etc.  I’m happy that we don’t

  have a connection to meet, but then start to realize that we are getting into territory where we might miss the last MARC train.  There is a woman in a red dress and loud voice across the aisle from John who came from GR, but lives in Washington now who says that we should take the bus outside

  the terminal that goes straight to the Greenbelt Metro station, it’s the B30.  John gets this information and learns that she is a tutor.  What subject?  Everything.  What grade or levels?  Every one of them.  That should have told us something right there and we should have closed our ears at that point and disregarded everything that she had said before.  But, no.  So, we arrive in Baltimore and we’re pushing making the shuttle to the train station before the last MARC train leaves, so we go with the 

 bus she mentioned.  We are standing out in the cold at a bus stop away from the terminal from 9:30pm to 10:30pm.  No bus.  No bus, no bus and my son is coughing and in the cold this whole time.  I’m getting

  more and more frantic, John says he might throw up because he wanted to go with this option and I’m realizing that we might not make it to DC tonight.  He calls the hotel to tell them we will be late  checking in, we can’t get any information from WMATA 

my Kondo packing vs. John's messy packing

 about the bus that is on their schedule and doesn’t arrive, an UBER from here is going to cost about $90.  We are getting frantic, fractious and I keep remarking, “Look there’s the MARC shuttle”, then think, why the hell is it still running?  Because it’s the 

 MARC/Amtrak shuttle damn it.  I had looked at Amtrak tickets when I first researched this and then totally forgot that they might run after MARC, so we head back to the terminal and find out that the shuttle is coming again soon 

and there is a 10:45pm Amtrak.  Well, we get to the train station to watch it pull away as we arrive.  Now, we’re in the middle of nowhere at a train station with no walls, in the cold again and Oscar now sounds like he has pneumonia.

There is another Amtrak train at midnight.  Well, that’s going to have to work.  I put Oscar in my lap and cover him with his blanket, my jacket and make him breathe inside the blanket, praying that he goes to sleep.  And he does, because we have 

  over an hour to wait for this train.  I rave about how stupid I was to change our plans, we might have made the last MARC train and we definitely would have made one of the 2 Amtrak trains that have left since we have been waiting for a  bus that didn’t arrive.  I blame the “tutor” in red and so does John.  But we sit there and wonder if we can do a 6 month

sabbatical trip to Europe.  We’re in the US, in our own capital city and we can’t get where we’re going.  What if this was in a foreign language and currency to boot?  It's really a sad time for these wander lusters.   At least other people are showing up at the station, so we know that something is coming.  That’s

another thing that stood out to me when we were waiting for the bus, there was no one else waiting for the bus that wasn’t coming, so someone knew something.  At least Oscar is asleep and not coughing right now, but John has to carry him to the train tracks downstairs 

while I get the luggage when the train comes.  We don’t have tickets, so the conductor tells us to have a seat in the dining car.  Oscar is placed on the table wrapped in his blanket and we wait.  The conductor says that he has to call the Amtrak 1-800 number

 and gives them my card and charges us $42 to get to Union Station in DC.  He could have told me that he was going to charge $100 each at that point and I would have been fine with it.  I told John, you know how you want to thank someone when you’re at this point and get a small bit of kindness?  Well, I wanted to grab this man and hug him, have God bless him, anything.  He even made a joke with some other passengers about how when you’re 

 young, you can sleep like Oscar is and still make it where you’re going.  John points out the “see something suspicious, say something” sign above Oscar’s head where he’s still swaddled without moving.  We have a child’s unmoving body covered on a table on the train and no one thinks this is suspicious or out of the ordinary at midnight on a Monday.  HELLO!!!! I start to cry in relief and can’t really stop because it’s been an ordeal.  We get to Union station and John gets us an Uber with the kindest lady from 

Somalia.  She lets us load up Oscar, and circles back around to the train station when I realize that I have dropped puppy.  Thankfully, he’s sitting in the street where we loaded up and we’re able to grab him and go.  She has 3 kids of her own and knows that it would have been bad for us when he woke up to find no puppy.

John's rendering of losing puppy at Union Station

She says that she lost a friend in the crash in Ethiopia today and we chit chat all the way to Arlington, where she drops us at the Westin.  Another person that I want to kiss and thank profusely.  We check in and Oscar finally wakes up to figure out where the hell we are and wait for his cot to be brought up.  He asked where puppy was first thing and we’re just going to let him be old enough to read the blog and filter through the archives to find out that his parents almost lost puppy on this trip.  He was anxious about 

     bringing him at all because we kept talking about taking the metro places, and the last time we were on a metro was Paris where we lost previous puppy.  We have a king bed, but they bring us a very nice bed that we’re able to put on the ground for him because he wants his own bed anyway.  So, after leaving our home at 2pm in Canadian Lakes, we finally get to get into our bed at the Westin in Arlington at 2am.  When we just had a one and half hour nonstop flight…..