Flying Standby

So we are finally home from our lovely vacation in Virginia. We had a lot of fun and I will do another post soon with some pictures and stories from our trip! However, this post is dedicated to flying standby. First of all, I would just like to thank Felicity for being so great and hooking us up with Buddy Passes through JetBlue! It saved us a ton of money and we probably wouldn't have even been able to go on a vacation without them. I will say this though, I will never ever ever travel standby (at least not in August and most definately not while I'm pregnant) again. Ever! We were supposed to fly out on Friday morning at like 8:00 to Long Beach, CA and then from there to Washington DC. Well, the flight to Long Beach was completely full so we weren't able to get on that flight. They told us that there was another flight that stopped in San Diego that left at 10:30 AM. The only thing was the flight from San Diego to Washington DC didn't leave until 10:15 PM. We decided to just do it because we weren't going to make it on any of the flights to Long Beach. So, we spent the entire day in San Deigo. This was on my birthday mind you. Because we had such a long wait, we decided to take a bus into town and see the harbor and get some lunch. It was fun but being pregnant and walking around in the heat in the middle of the day was not so good for me. We ended up just going back to the airport and sitting for the majority of the day. Luckily, Brandon was so sweet and kept randomly giving me presents throughout the day which made the day so fun for me! He was very creative and I loved it! Anyway, we finally made the flight to DC but didn't get hardly any sleep on the plane. It is NOT easy to sleep on a plane no matter how tired you are. We landed in DC at 6:15 AM and then found out that our luggage was not there. After calling around the lady told us it was probably at JFK airport(long story that I won't get into) and would possibly come in on the next flight from there. Which, thank heavens, it did. By the time we got to Charlottesville, we were both exhausted and ended up just sleeping most of the day. Now the story of our long journey home. We got out of DC just fine. Except for the fact that we got about 3 hours of sleep the night before and left for the aiport at 4:00 AM, it really wasn't too bad at all. We got into Long Beach at about 10:30 AM. I don't know if any of you have been to the Long Beach Airport but it is awful! It is so small and SO crowded and just ridiculous! Anyway, we found out once we landed that the flight we were supposed to take to SLC that night at 7:15 PM was completely full and we wouldn't get on it. Great. So now we were stuck in Long Beach for a full day and probably over night. UGH. So, we just decided to rent a car and get a room for the night and try and leave the next morning. My wonderful mom was able to get us a free hotel room for the night which was great. But I was not a happy girl. I was tired and hot and hungry and I just wanted to go to sleep. We had to wait until 3 to check into our hotel though so we just ate lunch and drove around for a couple of hours. Finally, we got to our hotel and I got to take a long lovely nap. We were told by someone at JetBlue that we needed to go to the airport that night so that we could be there in person to change our flight to the next morning. So we went without our luggage and just had to sit there for awhile. We didn't get on the flight (good thing because we wouldn't have been able to go anyway without our luggage) and were told that we probably wouldn't get on the morning flight either because it was booked. The lady there basically said if we wanted to get home we would probably need to drive to San Diego and try flying out of there. She also told us in not so many words that we were dumb to try travelling standy to Salt Lake from California the week before school was starting. We didn't even think of that. So, we went and talked to the rental car people and they told us it would end up costing us close to $150 to drive the car and drop it off in San Diego. Of course. All we could do was hope and pray that we got on the morning flight. By some miracle, we ended up getting on the flight that next morning and finally made it home! I am so tired from all this traveling nonsense and am so glad we made it! I'm sure Brandon and I will look back at it and just laugh but right now, not so much!