Because my brother Patrick was getting married on a Saturday just outside Charleston, South Carolina, originally my family had planned to make a small vacation of it. We were going to pull the kids out of school for a day or two on either end of the weekend, and take in the sights. Then Laura got word she had to be in class on the same day as the wedding, and she wouldn’t be able to go.
That left me taking four children by myself for a few days to the other side of the country. No, that wouldn’t work, especially with our youngest being not quite 17 months. I’m not afraid of taking all the kids on a trip, but without the other parent, it wouldn’t be as fun for everybody, and with our youngest, it would just be a logistical nightmare. And if he was going to have to stay behind and have a babysitter while I was away at the wedding and my wife in class, it only made sense for the three other kids to stay home with a babysitter as well, even from a strictly economic point of view.
So where does that leave me? Well, I wasn’t going to traipse off to South Carolina by myself for 4 days or so spending money when I could be working at my other job as a crossing guard, or helping to take care of the kids on Friday and Monday while Laura was doing her student teaching.
I did what any sane man would do – I altered my travel plans to an insane schedule. I needed to leave on Friday, after the kids had been put to bed. Well, mostly after I got the kids home from swim lesson. The way the flights worked out, I could leave Seattle at 11 p.m. and with a layover in Atlanta, arrive in plenty of time on Saturday to attend the wedding. The return – after the wedding, what was I to do? I had booked the first flight available as a return. This meant a 7a.m. flight out of Charleston, and with another layover in Atlanta, I would arrive in Seattle approximately 12:30 p.m., which would be helpful as I would hopefully be able to attend August and Déla’s Cross Country meet in the afternoon as well as be home in time for dinner (and the all-important bed time routine).
Fortunately we had enough frequent flyer miles stored up to cash in to get the airplane ticket.
I would be on the ground in Charleston for less than 24 hours. The scheduled looked something like this (all times local):
Fly out of Seattle – 11 p.m.
Arrive Atlanta – 6:30 a.m.
Depart Atlanta – 9:50 a.m.
Arrive Charleston – Noon
Photos? Familial obligations? Unknown.
Wedding starts – 5:30 p.m.
Estimated finish – Midnight
Fly out of Charleston – 7:30 a.m.
Arrive Seattle – 12:20 p.m.
Instead of getting a hotel room, for me, it made more sense to go directly from the wedding to the airport. I wouldn’t get much sleep, but I also wouldn’t be in danger of missing my flight home. Laura knew as we made the plans that I would be a wreck Sunday afternoon after getting home from essentially two days of travelling with little sleep, and that’s part of the plan. Dinner will be an easy one to fix, and I’ll have plenty of time to “zone out” and get back into the routine and schedule.
This calls into what I mentioned in an earlier blog post – what needs to be done isn’t always what we want to do. It would have been nice had we all been able to go, but that just wasn’t possible.