5/10–Long travel day

We are off on our Pacific Coastal-Alaskan cruises trip – at the crack of dawn. Well, actually before the crack of dawn!  4:45 wake up call, 5:30 shuttle to the airport and 6:50AM flight.  Phew – I’m tired just thinking about it!

Flight from Savannah goes off beautifully, plenty of time in Chicago to catch the 9:57 to LA. We grab a quick breakfast snack and head to the gate where we dutifully line up in our boarding zones. And, then.…the announcement.  Yep. Delayed.  First it is just a matter of getting the plane to the gate (it’s in the hanger).  Then it’s a maintenance issue that Engineering needs to sign off on.  It’s one hour, then it’s two hours….everyone is rushing for other flights, but we don’t really care.  The next flight is already 1 1/2 hours late arriving, the flight after that – well who knows?  We’ll stick with the original, even though it’s a tad boring sitting on the floor in the boarding zone line!

Eventually it all works out though, we get food vouchers (cool, lunch costs $1.30 in the final analysis) and when we are finally on the plane (push back 12:30pm), we get our first round of drinks on the house.  Hey- we’ve got nothing to complain about!

So, 2 hours late into LA, but we’ve nothing to do anyway.  Shuttle picks us up, we arrive at our cute little Best Western, go across the street for beer and wine, come back, sit by the pool and read, then head to dinner.  Casa Gambino, right next door, still the best Mexican food we’ve had in forever.  This time we stick with the happy hour menu which has items for $4 each.  We get the quesadilla, Tortoras (similar to nachos with refried beans and meat) and hot wings.  WAY too much food. The darn quesadilla is enough for two alone….plus beers (because their wine stinks) and we are so totally stuffed it isn’t even funny. For a total bill of $27.  In LA! Can’t beat it. And it’s the friendliest place. We end up chatting at the bar, and the guy next to us says – hey – I remember you guys from when you were in before!  Amazing!  He’s right – he was there 7 weeks ago.  Too much fun.

We waddle back to the BW and try to digest our food before bed time.  Not an easy task!