My family…husband, two children and their spouses, two grandbabies (8 months/3 years) and myself…traveled to Philadelphia to spend Mother’s day with my Mother-in-law. It was the first time my husband had ever done so but that’s another story and because it meant so much to him, we footed most of the expense.

One of the main problems was that four of the party worked Friday until 4 and 1 until 5 p.m. and our plane was scheduled to leave at 7:20 p.m. Needless to say; a whole lot of prior preparation had to be put into play. My son, who took the day off, and I did all of the last minute running around for everybody. My daughter-in-law, who is an overpacker and has no concept of time management, was ordered to begin packing on Monday since she had both babies to contend with. Everyone was ordered to be at my house by 5:15 which was doable. The 5 o’clocker works a short distance away and would just travel in his work clothes. Everything was coming together but our stress level must have transferred to the babies because we had a lot of whining and crying.

The next problems were fighting the 5 o’clock traffic and traveling a great distance to the airport. Well, Praise the Lord, we zoomed through traffic made to the airport without getting a ticket and while 6 of us were dropped off at check-in, my husband and sons-in-law found a great parking place and met us in the terminal. Well, the next problem, the overpacker's bags…anything over 50 pounds requires a $50.00 charge. Guess what, it weighed 47.9 pounds. After contending with technological glitches at check-in, we were off to the terminal. For some reason, my husband decided to relieve his stress by playing a trick on my son-in-law. After going through the checkpoint, my son-in-law could not find his watch. The workers stopped the machine, examined all of the bins and told him to proceed to a special officer. My husband had the watch all of the time and as a result almost got arrested for delaying the flight procedure. Well, guess who learned his lesson to not play jokes at the airport. In Orlando, you have to catch a tram across…we got on the wrong one and ended up in Terminal A instead of B. We finally got to the right place and boarding had begun…suddenly, our name was announced over the intercom. It seems that my daughter’s ticket was about to be canceled because she had not checked in although she showed the attendant her boarding pass and there was no record of a ticket for my 3 year old granddaughter even though my son was holding her boarding pass. All in all, we made it on!! Whew!!

Since this is getting very long, I will make this short. It took us an hour and a half to get our luggage once we arrived in Philadelphia; my son and another passenger got into the middle of an argument between an airport worker and a disgruntled passenger. Then my son had to be a witness to prove that the disgruntled guy caused the altercation. We are all hungry, still had to pick up the rental minivan, and get to the hotel. Once we get to the hotel, they have our reservations mixed up and we find out that we have to pay $31.00 plus 14% tax each night for the minivan. I could go on but you can see that it took some doing to spend a great weekend with my mother-in-law. Now let’s not talk about the trip back home.

Thanks for listening and in the end it was all worthwhile.