Summer Recap Part 2: 1.5 weeks up north

After Ted, Sara, and Leili left town I went back to work for about 4 days, then headed up north with Matt to good old Michigan from July 3rd until the 12th. The trip was amazing but we almost didn't make it there! Here's what went down:

First of all, you should know the plan was for me and Matt to fly out of our respective cities really early Friday morning the 3rd (7:30ish am flights) so that we could make the three hour drive up north to Oscoda and get there by 2ish so as to not waste the whole day. Now I'll tell the story...I get a call Thursday night July 2nd from Matt saying "o by the way, I just found out that my flight tomorrow got canceled (which should not have been a shock because Newark airport is the worst airport in the world, Matt has had a lot of canceled and/or severely delayed flights out of there) and I proceed to have a minor panic attack. Matt says he's going to call the airline and find out what other flights he can get on so we hang up.

I then call the cottage (where mom, dad, christy, ted, sara, and leili already are) and talk to dad and tell him about the bad news. He calms me down with his usual "it will all work out schpeel" and suggests we think outside the box for a solution, maybe Matt can fly out of a different city etc... My memory is a little fuzzy on the sequence of things here (that's what happens when you wait two months to post something) but eventually I was on the phone with Matt again and the only flights were like 12 hours later than the original, which would put us up north around midnight and would strand me at the airport for 10 or so hours. So, on a whim I check my flight out of DC and find out that there is ONE, exactly one, seat left on it and I ask Matt if he would be willing to drive down to DC tonight and fly out on my flight in the morning. He agrees to ask the airline but we are both concerned they'll slap some huge fee on him for having to transfer the ticket to another city or something. So Matt's on the phone with the airline, and talking to me online at the same time to try to coordinate everything and the airline agrees to put him on my flight and transferred his return flight to fly into DC instead of Newark since his car would be down here, all for no fee. Momentary sigh of relief, but it was about 6 or 7pm Thursday by the time we got this all figured out mind you and Matt still had to pack for the week and a half long trip and make the 5 hour drive down to DC that night for the 7:30 flight out in the AM, so it was still a little tense.

I finally get the call from Matt at about 10pm that he is now just leaving New Jersey so that puts his eta in Alexandria around 2:30/2:45, which really does not sound good when the alarm is set for 5am. I tried to go to bed right after that because in addition to getting up at 5am, I also had to drive for three hours after landing while Matt could sleep in the car, but as can be expected I probably got about a total of an hour of sleep by the time Matt got there at 2:45. So we got about 2 hours of sleep, then got up at 5am so that we could be out the door by 6am to take the shuttle from my apartment complex to the metro, which we were taking to the airport.

It only takes about 10 minutes to get to the airport on the metro from my stop, so it is incredibly convenient. So far everything is going well, we get to the metro at about 6:10 and I expect to arrive at the airport before 6:30, plenty of time. Well, when we tried to enter the metro station, we found out the gates were locked. The metro opens at 5 am on weekdays, and this was a Friday morning so I was really confused about why the gates would be locked, but then I remembered that since July 4th is a Saturday, everyone gets a holiday on July 3rd, which includes the metro employees. Turns out the metro doesn't open until 7am on holidays, it didnt even occur to me that the metro would not be open...cue another panic attack.

I call the cottage even though I know everyone must be sleeping to ask mom to look up the number for a cab company in Alexandria (I really should have a number stored in my phone, but hindsight is 20/20). So she looks up a number, I call the cab company, they send a cab and we are on our way from the metro station in the cab at around 6:40, much later than I would like, but still doable. Luckily, Reagan airport is pretty small and the Northwest flights leave from a separate terminal that has like 5 gates, so security lines are really short. The drive to the airport should take about 15/20 minutes and we are about to pull off the George Washington Parkway at the airport exit when the cab driver inexplicably bails at the last minute and gets back on the parkway because he thought he was on the wrong exit. Now I really thought we were going to miss the flight. The parkway does not have very many exits and I was worried we'd have to go several miles before being able to turn around, but the cab driver at least had a GPS and he pulled it out and it directed us back to the airport with a net loss of about 10 minutes. So we FINALLY get to the airport at about 7:10, flight is at 7:35. Luckily there was no line at all for northwest check in or security, and we got to the gate right when they began boarding.

It was pretty much smooth sailing from then on, we drove up north and arrived a little after 2pm, when we proceeded to pass out for a couple hours. After that we managed to have a good time up north with the fam. We hung out with my niece Leili, built a sand castle on the beach, hung out around the beach fire, went to the 4th of July fireworks on the beach (in sweatshirts and under blankets mind you) and just relaxed, it was paradise. Here are some pictures:

After spending Friday-Monday in Oscoda, we headed across the state to Matt's place on Burt Lake in Indian River. A TON of Matt's family was there, his mom's 4 siblings and all of their kids and their kids kids etc...it took up three whole cottages. There were three boats up there for the week and three jet skis so we just spent the whole time on the water. It was also a lot warmer than it had been during the weekend so it was much more fun to be outside. I was pretty terrible about taking pictures (the only reason I have pictures from Oscoda is because my mom took most of them for me) but here is a picture of all the boats hanging out at the north end of the lake.

There is a bald eagle at the top of a tree toward the middle of the picture...it was amazing, it just sat on that tree for like an hour before it flew away.

Getting back was much less eventful than getting there, it was a great trip and I really really mis being able to go up north all the time but it makes me appreciate it even more!