Back on solid ground

Oh hello hello crazy world. I'm back. well sort of. I'm not home yet but am in Cali for the next week and a half for a friend's wedding. Figured it was easier to fly from LA to Sacramento to pick up Alex and stay for the wedding then have him dropped off at the LAX airport, fly back to AK, only to turn around less than a week later to fly to Sacramento. I'm thinking of this as my half-way vacation home....easing me back into reality.

So for the curious about our Thailand trip, you'll have to wait a little while longer just because I've got to get reaquainted with Alex...he's just a grandma and grandpa's boy now and still a LIVE WIRE. Plus I have a million pics and stories to sort out for your amusement.

I will leave you with the story of how our trip started off though...

We got to LAX all pysched for the trip. We met my parents and handed Alex off to their estactic selfs, said our goodbyes and headed towards the check-in counter. Upon handing the lady our passports and tickets, she checked us out, then send, "oh no no. you can not go. I cannot let you." Apparently your passport must be valid 6 months from the date of travel for Thailand. Mine was 5 days short. Jake's was short 2 months. They would not give us the tickets to even attempt to see if Thailand wouldn't notice and just let us in. I was seriously on the verge of tears and had to hold myself back from lunging across the counter to grab our tickets. They told us that we could try the LA passport agency and get our passports in 24 hours. Yeah right. I was completely skeptical. but I made us an appointment for 9am the next morning (it was 8pm at the time), got us tentitavely booked on the next evening flight to Thailand though there was a catch that we'd have to stop over in Hong Kong for 3 days. Of course this all dependant on whether or not we got our passports renewed in time.

So after leaving the ticket counter, I spent the next 2 hours on the phone with Alaska Air, whom we booked it through, to figure out what our other options were if we couldn't get our passports. We ended up with a back up plan of either Costa Rica or Santiago, Chile. Both great backups but we were totally unprepareed to travel to those places as far as amount of info we had on it. So we didn't change our flight because we wanted to see how it went with our passports.

Miracles do happen people. They do, they do! I prayed SO hard that night that all would go well. Woke up, called Alaska Air to see if we could extend our trip since with the delay in when we'd be leaving, it wouldn't be worth it to do such a long flight with our existing return date. Thank you Nelly at Ak Air. She was amazing. Got us booked on the next flight, with a 3 day stop over in Hong Kong, extended our ticket to return on the 27th, and didn't charge us any type of fee. Plus she noted that if we didn't get our passports, that we could change to a different itinerary and not be charged. Usually you aren't allowed to change your intinerary once you've started a portion of your flight.

We arrived at 9am to the passport place and were told we'd have them renewed by 2pm that afternoon. Hurray Hurray! I had never been SO happy. We lost some money on a hotel we had already booked and it was too late to get a refund but that's way better than losing out on the entire trip plus even more hotels that I had already booked and were non-refundable. sheesh.

Anyways, when I get a chance (aka possibly alex's naptime), I'll work up a little something something about each city we visited and get some pics up on my To Greener Grass blog.

Thailand was great and we had lots of fun, but it is nice to be home...well sort of for me :)