Four States in One Day

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There are some compromises to be made when you're travelling. You have plenty of time but money is very limited; the sooner you burn through it the sooner you have to come home. Sticking to a budget is challenging and this is why we ended up taking a flight from Salt Lake City to Bozeman that went via Seattle. If, like me, your knowledge of US geography is a little limited, you may not realise how crazy this route was, but a quick look on google maps and you will understand.

Unlike our last big travel day, the day we went from Salt Lake City to Bozeman and then onto Big Sky was almost a complete disaster!

Our first flight left at 7.30am so we had a 5am start which was a little painful off the back of a week of snowboarding. We'd all had very little sleep the night before, fearing that for some reason the alarm would choose today to fail, despite successfully working for the previous seven weeks!

We boarded the plane looking forwards to getting a little sleep on our first flight from Salt Lake City to Seattle. Unfortunately at 9am we still hadn't set off and it was looking less and less likely that we'd make our connecting flight to Bozeman. We had just 1.5 hours between landing and catching our next flight - you do the math!

We had downloaded the Alaskan Airline app for mobile check in and the plane had wifi (fancy!) so we eagerly watched the status of our flight to Bozeman hoping it would also be delayed. Of course it wasn't, but the airline did push out new flights through the app. We were booked on another flight to Bozeman from Seattle which went via Portland (again, refer to google maps!). This was great news on the one hand, we wouldn't be spending the night in Seattle, but it meant arriving 4.5 hours later than planned and missing our transfer up to Big Sky. Then there was the uncertainty of whether our bags would follow us and whether we would make our new connection - we had only 50 minutes between landing at Seattle and our next flight leaving!

Our plane arrived in Seattle 15 minutes after our original flight to Bozeman left. We ran off the plane, took the train to the gate for our new connection and arrived at the desk out of breath and hoping that we were in fact booked on the new flights. We were, and we had 10 mins to spare before they boarded the plane, but they could not tell us anything about our luggage and whether that had also been re-routed.

It was only a hop from Seattle to Portland, we were in the air for a mere 23 minutes on a tiny little plane. After landing our first stop was the Alaskan Airlines desk to see whether or not our luggage was also in Portland and due to arrive in Bozeman on our new flight. Unfortunately it was still in Seattle and the earliest it would be with was the following day. We were all gutted and wondering how we would manage with nothing but our hand luggage that contained nothing practical at all (unless you rate a go pro, Apple TV and iPad over toothbrushes, PJs and clean underwear!). We managed to get $72 of food vouchers as compensation for the delay and set off in search of toothbrushes and food.

We had two hours to kill at Portland airport so we had a lovely, no expense spared lunch followed by Starbucks and then had some fun in the newsagent spending our last $12 on food and drink!

By the time we boarded our third flight of the day we were all shattered and disappointed about our bags. We all dealt with this in our own way. I slept, Paul drank two complimentary beers (can you tell we're not in Utah anymore!) and Katherine immersed herself in a book with a glass of red for company.

After finally arriving in Bozeman we made our way over to lost luggage to file a claim but were told we needed to wait until all bags had come off the carousel. We all thought this was crazy given we'd been told that our bags were still in Seattle but were too tired and deflated to argue. It felt like adding salt to the wound as we watched everyone else collect their bags. Kathrine optimistically commented that perhaps our suitcases would make it and only our snowboard bags had been left behind. Her timing was unbelievable as a split second latter my bag appeared! I couldn't believe it. Within a minute we had all three suitcases. Then the snowboard bags arrived. We were all so happy - the person next to us commented that they'd never seen anyone get so excited about luggage before.

The next challenge was to get a transfer up the mountain to Big Sky. Again, lady Luck was on our side as our original transfer company agreed to take us, for no extra charge on a shuttle that left in 30 minutes.

As we walked into our condo at 8pm, 14 hours after we left Salt Lake City, none of us could quite believe the day we'd had. We had woken up in Utah, and flown via Washington state, and Oregon before finally reaching Montana. Four states in one day and all for the sake of saving £100 each! I think there's a lesson in there somewhere!

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