Henry has had so many amazing firsts (first Christmas, first time meeting his five cousins and one of his great grandmas, first encounter with six feet of snow, first day of daycare, first croup, to name a few) that I can't really spend the next six months recounting our experiences in the Seattle airport because I'll miss out on writing about those other great adventures. So I'm going to give some quick and dirty highlights. On the second day of Snowmaggedon . . .
*We went back to the airport to catch a flight that was immediately cancelled, and stood in a standby line for two flights to Spokane that did leave, but did not take us, the 37th and 38th people on the list, along. While standing in this line, we tried our best to obey a schizophrenic ticket agent who shouted: "Everyone stay back! keep a space clear for ticketed passengers or you have no chance in hell of getting on this flight!" "Everyone crowd closer to the gate! I don't have a microphone and will only call standby travelers once!" We listened breathlessly for our names, and watched in envy as the lucky person about to actually fly away screamed out "That's ME. THAT'S me!" and elbowed through the crowd. We had a laughable debate about what to do if only one of us could get on the flight: Me (crying) "I can't leave you. I won't leave you!" Nate (annoyed) "Yes, you'll go, and take Henry out of here--the other passengers are beginning to salivate looking at his fat thighs. You must." Me (crying) "But what if I get on this plane, and you don't, and then my plane sits on the runway for two hours and then we have to come back inside the airport and my plane doesn't fly to Spokane. And meanwhile you get on another plane and fly away. And then when Henry and I get off of this plane that never left, we will be alone in the Seattle airport!" Nate (more annoyed) "That's not going to happen." Me (still crying) "Promise me that you won't get on a plane to go anywhere--even if it is your last chance to ever get out of here--until you see my plane fly away and you're certain it isn't coming back." Nate (realizing his wife is crazy) "I promise." Then we watched while the plane flew away and the entire airport was shut down because of a lack of de-icing fluid. The ticket agents just turned off the lights in the terminals and walked away, leaving us all to die.
*Nate tried to rent a car to drive us over the pass, only to be told that a 4WD Subaru would cost $275 a day and need to be returned to, of all places, Seattle. When he asked the cheerful Hertz rental car attendant if Hertz was exploiting stranded people by price-gouging, she said, "Ha. Ha. You're very funny making such a joke. That's not it at all. You see, what's happening is that right now, the demand for cars is much, much higher than our supply and people don't really have any other options. So we're charging three times as much."
* We booked a hotel that had an approximately three hour wait for, and I quote, a "women-and-children only" shuttle, and sat in baggage claim trying to get our luggage. During this time, we ran out of my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and I sent Nate to find me something to eat while I nursed Henry. The only thing left in airport concessions was a $10 bag of beef jerky and an orange juice. No kidding. Then the shuttle arrived and took us to the Marriott Town Suites in Renton, not to be confused with the Marriott Town Suites in Kent, where we had a reservation. This process is still a mystery to me, because the shuttle driver called my cell phone and said "the shuttle is here to take you to your hotel where you have a reservation." The Marriott Town Suites in Renton, where we were taken but did not have a reservation, had an identical room to the one we had actually reserved at the Marriott Town Suites in Kent, but it cost $60 more. When we checked into this identical but more expensive room, we ordered a pizza that was then taken to the Marriott Suites in Kent, where the pizza cost the random people staying in room 307 $6 less.
*Nate bravely returned to the airport to try to get our checked bags, since we had decided to snowshoe across the Cascades and would not be returning to the airport the next morning. When he got there, he stood in a line for three hours before a baggage handler came out and announced: "We are really tired of our incredibly inefficient means of sorting luggage. Putting all the black bags and all the green bags in different piles has made us weary. So we are going to stop returning to you the bags you checked this morning when you hoped you would get on an airplane. Instead, when the airport finally decides to get some more de-icing fluid and fly planes again, we are going to send your luggage to its original destination, and they will sort it out there. Your Christmas presents will be going to the place you thought you were spending Christmas, but you won't be. Sorry." And then the other baggage handlers clapped. Nate said he could have easily started a riot with a well-timed boo, but he was too busy panicking about the diapers. Which we had put back in our checked luggage. Yep. So there was lots of grumbling, and one memorably irate guy shouted out "What about my 90 pounds of frozen fish!!!" But no rioting. And Nate, following the angry fisherman's lead, finagled his way to our luggage and came back to the Marriott Town Suites in Renton at 2:30 in the morning with diapers. Traveler tip # 2: if you really want your stuff, tell baggage officials that your baby is going commando all over their airport, or that they're about to have three suitcases full of melting salmon sitting in their baggage claim area.
Later the next day, my parents arrived to rescue us, and we had an uneventful drive to Idaho and a really nice Christmas with our loved ones. While at the time it felt like a stressful initiation into traveling with an infant, in hindsight, we recognize it could have been a lot worse--none of the flights we actually took landed in the Hudson River, and that was nice.
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