HAPPY TRAILS -DAY 1

This is going to be a day by day, blow by blow description of our trip our west to see a bunch of national parks. We have done this before a few years ago and this is the third time we are trying to make a full circle. In 1965 Carol and I and her parents flew out to LA and arrived there just as the Watts rioting started. The hotel manager suggested that we take the baseball bat he was giving us, just in case. Thank goodness we didn’t need it.

This time, we are traveling by ourselves and are very proud that we actually made it through the first day. Our good friends Etta and Myer picked us up at 7:30 and drove us to the Savannah Airport, if you have not been there; it is a tiny and cute place. They sure know how to treat a person in Georgia. Our first flight was to Charlotte. And we had 37 minutes to get onboard our next flight. Wonder of wonders, our Savannah flight was 15 minutes early, which gave us a chance to go to the men’s and ladies’ room. For us oldsters, those are very important things. If you get to be over 70 you will find out what the advantage it is for a man to carry an empty Snapple bottle in the car, just in case.

Our second flight of the day was a 4 hour jaunt from Charlotte to Lost Wages. We once again arrived early and that’s when all the fun began. Let’s see now. We were in the last row of the plane row 35. So when the attendants got to us, they did not have any food left for us to buy. They did give us some trail mix as a favor. They plied us with Diet Coke and friendly banter. That kind of left us on a sugar high  from the assorted sugars in the trail mix,  as we got off the plane and headed to the baggage claim area.

Once again there was the usual stop at the facilities because of all of the diet soda and a quick train ride to the terminal where are baggage was supposed to be. Unfortunately, there were no baggage carousels going and few people waiting for their baggage. That seemed kind of strange to us. We did ask a person who seemed to be wearing a uniform and was told that we were in the wrong terminal. This airport is huge. We were told to go up the escalator and go outside and get on the inter-terminal shuttle to Terminal 1. I cannot tell you that this was a short ride. It took 15 minutes to get to terminal 1.

Once again there were few carousels going around. However, an arrival and departure postings also had a listing for our plane and a carousel number. We looked? at that carousel and nothing was moving. A friendly gent told us that the American Airlines office was a few steps away. We did see about 20 bags sitting in front of the office. I wonder how many other folks went to the wrong terminal.

We were then confronted with the need to find our rental car company. Another person and another question put us on a shuttle that took another 10 minutes to get to the car rental building. We were directed to the first floor (don’t take the escalator take the elevator. We found our company, Advantage, had a ginger peachy discussion with the attendant and was given a Dodge Challenger, rather than a Toyota Corolla (no charge for the larger car).

We left the attendant and found our car. Not sure if you have ever driven one of these things. It has power to spare (not like the 60’sversion). We augmented our great sense of direction and rented a GPS system. We put in the address of Harrah’s, where we are staying for the night. The GPS was way off and Carol’s persistence got us to the Valet park at Harrahs. We got a really nice lady to check us in early. We carried our load of bags up to the room. We tidied ourselves up and went down and gobbled up some pretty good food and some pretty good prices (I am not cheap). Went over the Video Poker machines and lost 60 bucks as fast as I could.

We are now in our room and I am tired of using the word WE. It’s off to Springdale tomorrow and part of the Grand Canyon. If I can figure out how to work my camera and upload some pics you can read and see at the same time. Day 2 coming up.