Las Vegas Trip: Part III – The Flight

The flight to Vegas was a little interesting. “May you live in interesting times interesting” but not quite “Oh God, oh God, we’re all gonna die” interesting. (Wink to all of my fellow geeks and nerds who got that joke. We miss you Captain Tightpants!)

Back to the flight. I was trying to use as few vacation days as possible. Partly due to the fact that I only have so many vacation days at my new job, and partly because I need a week for the upcoming February trip to Disney. So we had tickets to fly out Monday evening so I could put in a full day at work.

We got to the airport around 5 pm and our flight was scheduled to leave at 7 pm. We checked our bags. Originally we were going to check the car seat at the gate but as we forgot our gate check bag in the car and we had so much else to carry, we decided to check it through with our bags.

Then we headed to the TSA line. It was a little crazy, with all of the little bins for the x-ray machine as you can’t double up many things like laptops. So we had a ton of bins, and took a really long time going through the machine. Between us we had 2 jackets, 2 pairs of shoes, 2 laptops, 2 cell phones and wallets, etc. 1 stroller, 1 diaper bag, 2 backpacks and 1 carry on roller bag. It took a while.

I wore A in my Ergo baby carrier as advised by the baby sites (see here for more details about what sites I used) and did not go through the full body scanner. I went through with A and they cleared me. N however, got the full treatment. It took around 10 minutes extra while they patted, scanned and otherwise investigated him very closely. Poor N.

Delta

We flew Delta, so we had a stopover in Atlanta, which is the Delta hub. Our flight to Atlanta was delayed by 50 minutes, which made things super tight as our stopover was 45 minutes. So we were very nervous the whole flight long. By the time we took off we knew it was likely we would miss our next flight. We decided not to worry too much about it for the flight as there was nothing we could do and we tried to enjoy the flight.

I nursed A as we took off as advised by all of the baby sites and our pediatrician. It worked beautifully, she fell asleep, and that was that.

We arrived in Atlanta and the super nice flight attendant asked all passengers with no connection to let those who did have one get first. We were not the only ones to have a flight to catch and several others had already missed theirs. We took off running. For those who don’t know, the Atlanta airport is really big and a train is needed to take you form terminal to terminal. So we took the train to the next terminal and ran up to the gate and just made it.

Apparently the flight was waiting until the last possible moment to take off so that we could catch it. They told us that they had planned to wait two more minutes before giving up on us. Phew! We got on the plane and they closed the door behind us.

The flight to Las Vegas was very nice. We were on a much nicer plane than the first flight. There was a full entertainment center including regular TV. N and I were really happy to be able to catch the tail end of the game. A stayed up for a little bit and played with the touch screens, she was fascinated with them as the button turned blue when she touched it. We kept turning the screen off so she could turn it back on. After a bit I fed her again and she once more passed out.