Weather Change in Plans

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And so, another journey begins. We were scheduled to fly out Friday morning at 6 am, but we live in Southern New England, and snow happens here. Our flight was cancelled yesterday, so we spent the day rescheduling. In order to make sure we would get out of Providence before the pending storm, we opted to leave the night (tonight) before and spend the night at a hotel at the Newark Liberty Airport.

This of course meant Tarragon would spend a night alone and it would not be until Friday evening that his nanny arrived. But he was well petted and fed before we left. He certainly knew we were leaving because he spent much of the afternoon shunning us under the bed.

Flying out of Providence is so very simple, we were checked in and through TSA in all of 7 minutes. Even if you are not TSA Pre-checked, the line for security is maybe 15 minutes and the airport was busy today.

We haven’t quite figured out the exact time we need to leave our apartment to get to the airport without waiting to long at the airport. Today we left at 4 and had about a 90-minute wait before the flight took off. We could have actually gotten away with leaving between 4:30 and 5 and still arrived in plenty of time to make our 6 pm flight.

With the rescheduled flight we did not get the comfort of first class on the flight to Newark. Instead, we had Economy Plus at an exit row. The seats were so narrow that my leg kept hitting the seat recline button. And the seats were like sitting on a part bench, zero padding. The leg room was good, but that was more because we were at the exit row. It was a very small plane and very bumpy the entire way. There was zero on flight service, not even first class got so much as a bottle of water. The only good part was it was a short flight and we got their early.

We thought, or I should say I thought, they lost our luggage, because the United app was not able to track the bag. It did arrive with us, so that was a disaster adverted.

We took the complimentary shuttle to the Marriott; the shuttle was packed and when we got to the hotel the line to check in was 4 deep on three different aisles. There was even a line to get on the elevators. We later discovered that the woman’s Hartford University basketball was at the hotel as well as the NJ Port Authority personnel preparing to deal with any snow that may fall over night.

Dinner was at the only option available the hotel lobby restaurant. It was ok, nothing to write home about and extremely busy. They had two servers, one bartender and 2 cooks. They were so overwhelmed it took over 90 minutes to get a couple of burgers.

We did at least avert the storm and should arrive in Mexico City on time tomorrow afternoon.

We have a pretty full five days planned from a cooking class to a private tour of the Toltec Pyramids.

I have not been to Mexico City in over 20 years and Jerry has never been, so we are really looking for a nice albeit brief get away. And I do turn 60 while we are there.

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